At the Intersection of Image, Text and Ritual: The Lotus Sutra in Mogao Murals

Dr Neil Schmid’s presentation titled ‘At the Intersection of Image, Text and Ritual: The Lotus Sutra in Mogao Murals’. This presentation was given on 16 December 2022 at the British Library conference 'The Lotus Sutra: The teachings, transmission and material culture of a sacred Buddhist text'.
In medieval China, the Lotus Sutra served as an object of devotional rituals through a complex variety of textual, material, and visual forms. Reading, reciting and copying the sutra were core practices, all of which were accompanied by a constellation of rituals sacralising these acts. But what of the contents of the scripture, its narratives and doctrines? How did adherents, the vast majority of whom were illiterate, actively engage in understanding the text itself? What were the visual and ritual expository forms that facilitated comprehension both among individuals and across communities? This paper explores the unparalleled resources from the Mogao Caves and its cache of manuscripts for answers to these questions, in particular 9th and 10th century expositions of the Lotus Sutra in the form of ‘transformation tableaux’ and ‘sutra lecture texts’, both of which were used in a widespread ritual known as the popular lecture. This analysis details how these two seemingly diverse forms worked in tandem as a singular hermeneutic to further comprehension of and devotion to the Lotus Sutra.
Organised to celebrate the successful close of the Lotus Sutra Project (2017 - 2022), the conference brought together an international group of scholars and the Project team to present on the impact of the Lotus Sutra as a critical Buddhist text. The conference investigated the teachings of the Lotus Sutra, the Lotus Sutra as represented at Dunhuang, and the methodology and results of the Lotus Sutra Project, which has now conserved, digitised and published nearly 800 Lotus Sutra manuscripts in the British Library’s collections.