Stabilizing Empire through Buddhist Architectural Monument, Text, and Image

The gate at Juyong Guan, meaning “Dwelling in Harmony Pass” (Mongolian. Chabchiyal), is located at the foot of the famous Great Wall, about thirty-seven miles (sixty kilometers) northwest of Beijing. A strategically important hub on a pivotal route in the fourteenth century, Juyong Pass connected Daidu (modern-day Beijing), the winter capital, to the northern areas, including the summer capital, Shangdu—the two capitals of the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368). With the Mongol incorporation of Tibetan areas in 1247, Mongolian emperors came to embrace Tibetan Buddhism, through which they ruled. They constantly invited Tibetan lamas to their capitals, built royal monasteries, and set up official institutions to create Tibetan Buddhist art. Juyong Guan Gate (figs. 1 and 2) is a monumental surviving testament of this artistic, cultural, and political legacy, its six-language inscriptions propagating imperial identity in a Buddhist framework. 

Construction 

The existing monument is a massive rectangular platform with a grand gateway in the center, facing north and south. Its magnificence is attributable to its grand scale. Historical records and inscriptions record that the original gate complex of the Juyong Guan Gate comprised the gate and Yongming Baoxiang Temple, and Juyong Guan Gate once supported three stupas on top of it. The temple and the three stupas no longer exist. A comparison with the stupa gate built in 1311 at Xijindu in Zhenjiang, Jiangsu Province (fig. 3), gives a sense of Juyong Guan Gate’s original appearance.1 

Juyong Guan Gate was constructed from 1342 to 1345, under the order of Toghan Temür Khan (1320–1370; r. 1333–70), the last emperor of the Yuan dynasty. Toghan Temür was such an avid follower of Tibetan Buddhism that later Confucian historians consider this one of the causes of the fall of the Yuan dynasty. Many important Mongolian, Chinese, Tibetan, and Tangut officials and monks were responsible for the gate’s construction, including Tibetan monk-officials Namkha Sengge, who supervised the project, and Imperial Preceptor Kunga Gyeltsen Pel Zangpo (1310–1353), the highest religious authority in the land, who performed the consecration ritual after its completion.2

Images and Inscriptions

Relief carvings are engraved on the north and south facade of the platform around the gateway openings and the inner vaulted ceiling and walls. Six ornaments commonly found on Nepalese and Tibetan gateways, or toranas—mythical bird (garuda), snake spirit (naga), water monster (makara)) (fig. 4), leogryph, youth, and elephant—are carved on the north and south faces of the base, framing the gateway openings. 

On the vaulted ceiling (fig. 5), five mandalas (fig. 6) are engraved in shallow relief along the apex of the central axis, whose main deities are identified by Uyghur and Mongolian inscriptions as Akshobhya (fig. 6), Sarvavid Vairochana, Vajrapani, Amitabha, and Shakyamuni.3 The inscriptions also identify the large Buddhas of the Ten Directions (fig. 7), which line the east and west sloping sides, surrounded by tiny reliefs of the Thousand Buddhas of the Fortunate Aeon (Bhadrakalpa).4 The Four Guardian Kings (fig. 8), who traditionally guard the four cardinal directions at the entrances of Buddhist temples, are engraved on the east and west inner walls of the gateway near the north and south entrances.

In addition, the inner walls at the top are also inscribed, in large Lantsa (Sanskrit) script, with two dharani, Sanskrit formulas believed to have protective power through their sound and written physical presence: the Ushnishavijaya Dharani and the Tathagatahridaya Dharani, which are associated with long life, purification, and protection/averting disaster. 

Smaller inscriptions in Tibetan, Mongolian square script, Uyghur, Tangut, and Chinese transliterate these Sanskrit incantations and celebrate the merits of stupa construction (fig. 9).5 The inscriptions in each language differ. For instance, the Tangut and Chinese inscriptions additionally provide a story from the Tathagatahridaya Sutra that helps explain the benefit of building such a stupa at a crossroads with the dharani in it to prevent shortening of life and to avoid unfortunate rebirths as an animal and in the hell realms.6 

The Mongolian inscriptions articulate a Buddhist sacralization of Mongol rule, likening the founder of the Yuan dynasty Qubilai Khan (r. 1260–1294) to Ashoka, stupa builder and the archetypal Indian universal Buddhist ruler (chakravartin), and further glorifying Qubilai Khan and, by extension, his successors of the Yuan imperial line as long-prophesied bodhisattva rulers, establishing the sacral nature of their rulership and empire:

That blessed bodhisattva the Emperor Sečen [Qubilai], possessed of vast wisdom, about whom the prophecy was made that there would be someone named “the Wise one from the vicinity of Mount Wutai” [Manjushri] who would become a great emperor. . . . Commemorating in gold the marvelous deeds which have been brought about by those bodhisattvas destined by Heaven [to rule; that is: the Yuan emperors], [I] the Emperor Bodhisattva, the Son of Heaven and Master of Men [Toghan Temür], have caused this extensive and vast pagoda to be founded.7

This unusual language draws on one of the most important tantric authorities on prophecy, especially related to kings, the Manjushrimula Tantra.

All the images at Juyong Guan Stupa Gate are in low relief. The depictions of the buddhas and bodhisattvas at the gateway follow Tibetan iconographic and visual conventions combined with distinct Nepalese aesthetics. Surrounding these buddhas (fig. 7) is a scrolling flower pattern, a prominent stylistic feature of both Xixia and Yuan art that can also be seen in contemporaneous Yuan court production and in the early fourteenth-century renovations at Zhalu Monastery in central Tibet. Nepalese decorative motifs visible at Juyong Guan Gate appear in the decorative arch framing the entranceways (fig. 4), especially in the dramatically stylized scrolling foliate tails of the water monsters at the top.

Chinese artistic idioms are reflected in the faces, armor, implements, and attendant demons of the Four Guardian Kings (fig. 8) at the gateway. Some subjects, such as “new mode” Manjushri (fig. 10) and Water-Moon Avalokiteshvara decorating the armor worn by the Four Guardian Kings, are derived from Tangut Buddhism, originating in the Silk Road kingdom of Tangut/Xixia, conquered and absorbed by the Mongol Empire in 1227.8

The entire relief at Juyong Guan Stupa Gate exemplifies a perfect fusion of Tibetan, Chinese, and Tangut art. This rich fusion of artistic traditions is closely related to the sophisticated cosmopolitan idiom of Tibetan Buddhist art created by the workshop of the royal court in the Yuan dynasty. The decoration with Buddhist images and dharanis in Juyong Guan Stupa Gate closely resembles that of the imperially sponsored White Stupa in Beijing, completed in 1279, which is attributed to the Nepalese artist Anige (1245–1306).

Function and Symbolism

It has been suggested that Juyong Guan Stupa Gate was built as a religio-political monument intended to revitalize Mongol rule through the articulation of an all-encompassing Buddhist vision of universal rulership, combined with its accompanying cosmology of religious imagery and magical dharani formulas.9 

According to historical records, the construction of stupa gates in Beijing followed a precedent established by Qubilai Khan, who had a stupa erected on top of the south city gate (Zhangyi Gate) in 1294.10 Regarding the origin of its architectural form, scholars have not yet come to a definitive conclusion. Stupa gates are found in Tibetan regions, and in Ladakh many gateway stupas are dated to the thirteenth to fourteenth century.11 Most scholars thus assume that this form was introduced from Tibet and is closely related to the function of Buddha Akshobhya (meaning “unshakable”) to provide stability, in the physical sense of geomantic protection and here, perhaps by extension, of the realm. The central mandala (fig. 6) at Juyong Guan Gate is Akshobhya, with the surrounding deities personifying the Eight Auspicious Symbols, a specific form suggesting this monument is analogous to Kankani stupa gateways found in Ladakh.12 The name Kankani refers to the dharani of Akshobhya, which commands that evils be cut off and obstacles dispelled.13 Gateway stupas did not become widely popular until Akshobhya took over the central position in stupas, which in Ladakh appears to have occurred in the late thirteenth century.14 The other four mandalas in this gate are the first four of the Purification of All Bad Rebirths Tantra (Sarvadurgatiparishodhana Tantra), and are all protective in nature.

Why was such a protective stupa gate needed at this place and time? Juyong Pass became increasingly important strategically when control over Mongolia was in question, which became true after 1323, when Yisün Temür Khan (r. 1323–1328), in a Mongolia-based coup d’état, seized power in Daidu. In 1326, he ordered Sanskrit dharanis carved on the walls of Juyong Pass.15 However, this proved insufficient, as a short but intense civil war (1328–1329) soon followed between the two capitals on either side of the pass. Civil conflict was therefore a driving force in fortifying the pass. 

Thus, by means of these images and multilingual inscriptions, the last Yuan emperor aspired to reinforce unity among the various ethnic groups under his rule, consolidate political power, and realize peace and stability. However, already in the 1330s and 1340s the dynasty had been rocked by a series of new crises, including disease and famine—disasters that the stupa gate was intended to suppress—and the Yuan collapsed soon after, unable to ritually stem the tide. In 1368 Toghan Temür fled north through Juyong Guan Gate, where his descendants continued to claim the Yuan title in Mongolian lands until 1634.16 

Thank you to Xiong Wenbin for his help in developing an initial draft of this essay.