Medieval Buddhist of the Day

[Twitter, 8/1/19] Medieval Buddhist of the Day: the nun Sengda 僧達. In 525 (N. Wei) she dedicated a niche on the west cliff at Longmen (no. 652 in the cataloging system of the Longmen Research Institute). She wrote: 比丘尼僧達為亡息文殊造釋迦像，願亡者生天，面奉彌勒… “The nun Sengda commissioned a figure of Sakyamuni for her late son Wenshu [‘Manjusri’], in the hopes that the deceased will be reborn in heaven, and serve Maitreya face to face…”

What’s interesting is the cast of characters in this dedication. Our donor is both a nun and a mother, most likely having taken her vows after marriage and childrearing, and perhaps in her widowhood. She named her son Manjusri – not altogether unusual, as we’ve seen other medieval Buddhists with names taken from the sutras (善才, for instance). We might hazard that this indicates a particular devotion to Manjusri, but then we might say the same of her choice of icon (Sakyamuni) or wish for the deceased (to serve Maitreya in heaven). In fact, she seems comfortably devoted to all three, and probably some others too.

We do regularly find figures of Maitreya inscribed with the hope to be reborn in his Tusita heaven, but inscriptions like Sengda’s reveal that it wasn’t necessary to harmonize the subject matter of the image with the substance of one’s hopes for the beneficiary. Sixth-century popular Buddhism seems to have been as cheerfully ecumenical as Chinese folk religion in general, even as the roots of later sectarian traditions (Chan, Pure Land, etc.) were beginning to grow. It seems many objects of devotion were available, even for a nun. This may also explain the iconographic ambiguity of some fifth- and sixth-century figures, which can only be identified as “a Buddha” or “a bodhisattva,” by contrast with the complicated and sometimes esoteric iconographic detail of later images.

Next question: what did Sengda’s Buddha figure look like? I haven’t yet found a photo of the niche, but I’m still looking.