Resumen de Crafting Boundaries of the Unseeable World: Dialectics of Space in the Bhagavat Sutra Repository
The Bhagavat Sutra Repository (1038) in China, celebrated as the earliest extant wood-construction repository of sutras in East Asia, includes elaborate wood cabinets in the shape of miniaturized architecture. Challenging the traditional treatment of the cabinets as merely a model for reconstructing the middle-period architecture in northern China, this essay examines contemporaneous visual, technological, and religious knowledge cutting across Buddhist and funerary discourses that natured the emergence of the distinctive structure. In so doing, this study showcases the complex ways in which boundaries between the mundane and the sacred were visualized at the dawn of the second millennium in China.
