House of the Buddha in Scale: China’s “Small” Architecture
Wei-Cheng Lin, The University of Chicago
The images of the Buddhist Pure Land, heavens, and paradise are often depicted with an abundance of auspicious events and apparitional deities surrounding the sermon-preaching Buddha at the center. Marvelous and ineffable, the blissful land is nonetheless organized within the fantastic, yet calculated and well-positioned architectural complex. Described as “heavenly palaces and pavilions” (tiangong louge), the otherworldly architecture, in fact, consists of buildings and structures of this world—in miniature. While the micro-architecture provides the sense of a sacred locale, its small scale visually and conceptually distinguishes and separates the sacred from the secular. In this talk, I shall argue that the two domains are never so distinct, with their architectures closely related in scale. In this regard, the architectural “scale” performs as the epistemological device that converts the infinite and undefinable architecture of the sacred into measurable and perceivable structures, thus making the presumably unreachable world more accessible and imaginable.
The Harvard Buddhist Studies Forum is grateful to the Committee on the Study of Religion, the Mahindra Humanities Center, the Asia Center, the Department of History of Art & Architecture, the Department of South Asian Studies, the Harvard Divinity School, and the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies for their support in making this event possible.
Image: Alter-niche of Erxian Temple, Jingcheng, Shanxi Province.
LOCATION:Plimpton Room, Barker Center STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20230308T230000Z DTEND:20230308T230000Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR