一山而五頂：多學科、跨方域、多文化視野中的五臺信仰研究國際學術研討會=An International Conference The Mountain of Five Plateaus： Studies of The Wutai Cult in Multidisciplinary and Transborder/Cultural Approaches
出版日期
2015.07
出版者
山西省佛教協會
出版地
山西, 中國 [Shanxi, China]
資料類型
會議論文=Proceeding Article
使用語言
英文=English
附註項
主辦方: Buddhist association of Shanxi Province 山西省佛教協會 作者單位：Stanford University=美國史坦福大學
摘要
The story of the Silla cult of Mount Odae (Ch. Wutai), as it appears at first sight, is that of transmission and localization. The story involves the right kind of actors for the kind of narrative that it is: Chajang, an elite monk, a sinophile, a pilgrim to Mount Wutai in China, who introduces the Chinese practice of Mañjuśrī veneration on a “five-terrace mountain” into Silla Korea, and Poch’ŏn and Hyomyŏng, two princes of the Silla dynasty, pious lay practitioners of Buddhism, members of the cultural and political elite, who develop a uniquely Sillan expression of the cultic practice that continues to this day. It is the familiar story of high Chinese culture’s “transplantation” to the empire’s periphery and of the Korean elite’s “domestication” of the imported cultural elements. However, the maintenance of such a story of the Mount Odae cult comes in fact at an exorbitant theoretical cost: The key protagonists of the story have to be reassigned, if we want to reconcile the historical contradictions the primary sources raise, and the most esoteric passages in the Buddhist canon must be invoked, if we are to explain the doctrinal and practical idiosyncrasies of the cult’s Buddhism. Despite almost a thousand years of traditional and modern scholarly inquiry, there is no agreement on how to historicize even the most basic events of this narrative. The story of the cult’s transmission and localization raises more problems than it explains. This study starts from the suspicion that the story of transmission and localization may not then be the best approximation of the Mount Odae cult’s appearance and development in Korea. From a philological analysis of the two Koryŏ dynasty records on the Mount Odae cult, the study first establishes that both these records were compiled based on sources of the same textual origin the provenance of which is the mountain region itself. Further analysis of the narratives contained in these records would advance a portrayal of the mountain cult as simple local Buddhists of this remote region. It will be argued that despite the narratives’ claim, these Buddhists did not have close contacts with the religious, cultural, or political elite of Silla, let alone high Chinese culture, and that they accordingly practiced a distinctive idiom of Buddhism that largely deviated from the Sino-Korean norms. The study concludes that the story of Korean Mount Odae cult, then, may be better told as that of inspiration and emergence than of transmission and localization, that the cult may be understood as an indigenous, independent materialization of the floating abstract idea of “Mañjuśrī’s five-terrace mountain.”
