Transcultural Visions of a Buddhist Mountain

This panoramic map depicts the sacred Mount Wutai (Wutai Shan, literally the Five-Terraced Mountains) in Shanxi Province in northern China (fig. 1). The map is a six-foot-wide print on linen that has been hand colored. It contains some one hundred and fifty sites in a mountain range filled with travelers, festivities, flora and fauna, and cloud-borne deities. The woodblock panel was carved in 1846 by a Khalkha Mongol lama named Lhundrub at Mount Wutai’s Cifu Temple (Benevolent Virtues Temple). The hand-colored print is among numerous examples from the same woodblock panel in collections around the world. A trilingual title, “The Panoramic Picture of the Sacred Realm of the Mountain of Five Terraces” in Tibetan, Chinese, and Mongolian, runs across the top register of the composition, and a trilingual donative inscription at the bottom of the composition details the purpose of the mapping project. The map encapsulates the cosmopolitan reality of Mount Wutai in the nineteenth century as a vibrant center of economic trade and religious devotion for different groups of people in Inner Asia, including Manchus, Tibetans, and Mongols above all. As a depiction of holy landscape and architecture, it bears witness to a millennium-old, pan-Asian practice of picturing the sacred mountain. The map’s global circulation attests to the efficacy of the woodblock medium in disseminating knowledge, mediating pilgrimage experience, and redefining sacred geography.

Tibetan Buddhism on Mount Wutai

Located in Shanxi Province in northern China, Mount Wutai was recognized as early as the fifth century as the earthly residence of the Bodhisattva of Wisdom Manjushri, one of the most important deities of Mahayana Buddhism (fig. 2).1 By the early eighth century, Mount Wutai rose to prominence as a center of monastic learning, royal patronage, and Pan-Asian international pilgrimage.2 Tibetan Buddhism was first established on Mount Wutai during the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368), when Mongol emperors invited Buddhist ritual masters from Tibet to the mountain. Mount Wutai developed into a center of Tibetan Buddhist pilgrimage and monasticism in the Qing dynasty (1644–1911).3 The early Manchu emperors, who fashioned themselves as kingly emanations of Manjushri, promoted Mount Wutai through the production of mountain gazetteers, imperial tours to the mountain, and patronage of its monasteries. As a result of the Qing support of the Gelukpa monastic order of Tibetan Buddhism, monks and pilgrims from Tibet and Mongolia populated the mountain. Their presence continued in the nineteenth century even as imperial support waned, earning Mount Wutai the appellation “China’s Tibet.”4

Mount Wutai’s Tibetan Buddhist transformation is nowhere more evident than in the map in the Rubin Museum collection. The sites and miracles depicted on the map are predominantly associated with the Gelukpa tradition of Tibetan Buddhism through the display of apparitions, such as that of the Gelukpa founder Tsongkhapa on each of the five peaks and elsewhere on the mountain. The yellow-roofed monastery just to the left of the center of the map represents Bodhisattva’s Peak (Pusa Ding).5 As the unchanged center of worship and imperial sponsorship since the Tang dynasty (618–907), Bodhisattva’s Peak was extensively renovated into the chief Gelukpa monastery and official imperial establishment (with yellow-glazed tiles) to house Mount Wutai’s jasag lamas, the highest religious officials of the mountain.6 The monastery also included an imperial traveling palace (xinggong) for the visiting Qing emperors. During the Qianlong reign, Bodhisattva’s Peak housed approximately one-third of the three thousand lamas (with Tibetan, Mongol, Manchu, and Chinese ethnic markers) residing at Mount Wutai. A Maitreya procession and a masked ritual dance (tsam) descend from the Bodhisattva’s Peak and wind their way down to the mountain’s most prominent landmark of Tibetan Buddhism, the White Stupa (figs. 3 and 4). It was first built by the famous Nepalese artist Anige (1245–1306) in 1301 at the behest of the Mongol Yuan emperor Temür (r. 1294–1307). The White Stupa’s striking new Himalayan architectural form towered over existing Chinese-style architecture and remains the most iconic monument on the mountain today.

The Practice of Picturing Mount Wutai

For as long as Mount Wutai has been a pilgrimage destination, its pictures and models circulated all over the Buddhist world, serving variously as surrogates, souvenirs, and guides for pilgrims and devotees.7 The Rubin map descends from a long-standing tradition of imageries combining landscape elements, miraculous apparitions, and the built environment of majestic monasteries and stupas to highlight the numinous quality of Manjushri’s earthly abode. The Chinese Central Asian desert oasis of Dunhuang contains a large cache of paintings of and texts on Mount Wutai. Among them, a monumental mural stretching the entire forty-five-foot (fourteen-meter) span of the west wall of a cave shrine (Mogao Cave 61) (fig. 5), which was dedicated to Manjushri between 947 and 951, simulates the experience of pilgrimage to the mountain.8 The Cave 61 mural from Dunhuang and the Rubin map, created more than a thousand years apart and more than a thousand miles from each other, share remarkable similarities. Their composition of a mountain range filled with apparitions, auspicious clouds, prominent temples, stupas, and miraculous sites, their comparable positioning of the terraces (from left to right, following the same order of south, west, central, north, and east) and mountain gates, and their details of tireless travelers all point to an enduring vision of the mountain as the abode of Manjushri’s enlightened activities regardless of the changing cultural and sectarian affiliations. 

Yet despite these similarities, what makes the Rubin map unique, and its woodblock carvings a particularly widespread source of influence, is that the image was created from the mapmaker’s firsthand knowledge of the mountain range, rather than based on earlier pictorial models or textual sources, as scholars believe to have been the case for many images from Dunhuang.9 From the delineation of the precise number of bays and halls of temples, and the inclusion of otherwise little-known hamlets and villages around the mountain, to the lively and often humorous depictions of popular pilgrimage activities and local legends (fig. 6), elements of the map display an intimate knowledge of Mount Wutai from the unique perspective of the mapmaker that is not seen in any other extant visual or textual materials. The woodblock carver’s home monastery of Cifu Temple, built only thirty years before the block panel was carved, is prominently situated just to the right of the central dividing line, in a position that counterbalances Bodhisattva’s Peak, the millennium-old locus of pilgrimage and imperial authority at Mount Wutai.10 In addition, many Daoist (non-Buddhist), Tibetan Buddhist (non-Chinese), and nonreligious sites (out-of-the-way hamlets and villages), which did not appear in Chinese-language mountain gazetteers because of their lack of proper religious affiliation or significance, are included on the map, and each site is carefully labeled with a bilingual inscription in Chinese and Tibetan. The map’s inclusive view of the mountain contrasts sharply with purely Buddhist portrayals of the mountain by Buddhist authorities and imperial officials from the outside. 

Efficacy of the Map Image

The carver’s comprehensive and inclusive approach speaks to the use of the map as a surrogate for the experience of a pilgrimage to the mountain. The trilingual donative inscription on the bottom spells out the efficacy of the map, but differs slightly in the three languages.11 The Tibetan and Mongolian inscriptions, which parallel each other, stress the efficacy of coming into sensory contact with the map through “seeing, hearing, touching, and remembering” as means to receive the bodhisattva’s blessing, while the Chinese version elaborates on the benefits from peregrinating the mountain and proliferating the image:

Benefactors everywhere who make a pilgrimage to the sacred realm of Clear and Cool [alternate name for Mount Wutai], who view this picture of the mountain in order to listen to and recount the numinous efficacy and wondrous Dharma of the bodhisattva, will in this life be free from all calamities and diseases, and enjoy boundless blessings, happiness and longevity. After this life, they will be reborn in a land of fortune. . . .Should a person make the vow to print this image, they will accumulate immeasurable merit.

The map image proliferated just as the inscription had encouraged. While the woodblock panel remained at Cifu Temple until the early part of the twentieth century, prints of it were hand-colored, collected, and sold by artisans, pilgrims, and merchants, and widely circulated around the globe. As many as thirty separate impressions from the same carving and later copies in a variety of mediums present different schemes and styles of coloration, selective highlighting of sites, figures, narratives, and languages, and various modes of display and usage.12 An impression of the same woodblock panel now in the National Museum of Finland, Helsinki, exemplifies a contrasting afterlife of the carved image (fig. 7).13 While the Rubin print is mounted with brocades in the format of a thangka painting that was likely hung as an object of veneration, the Helsinki print exhibits multiple traces of creases, indicating that it was folded up for prolonged periods and may have been stored in a pilgrim’s amulet box. The difference in the coloration, physical condition, and handling of the maps suggests divergent uses, one as an iconic image of the holy mountain to be venerated as a surrogate of the mountain itself, and the other as a guide for actual pilgrimages. In sum, each act of carving, printing, coloring, framing, copying, and circulating the map image presented a new vision of the mountain. The collaborative and accretive process of mapmaking highlights the roles maps and their makers and users play in Mount Wutai’s transcultural place making.

To further explore the map of Mount Wutai, visit the Wutaishan Map Blockprint interactive.