Medieval Buddhist of the Day

[Bluesky, 1/7/25] Medieval Buddhist of the Day: Wang Senghuan 王僧歡 of Chang’an. In 528 he dedicated an image to a surprising range of beneficiaries. It’s normal for lists of beneficiaries to start with the emperor and the state, then touch on personal concerns, then expand outward to “all living beings” or something like that. But Wang Senghuan’s list is unusually complete and explicitly hierarchical. He writes 願皇祚永隆，歷劫師僧、七世父母、兄弟姊妹、妻子女等、及善友知識、邊地眾生，常生佛國，彌勒出世，龍華三會，願登初首。

Thus: “Let the imperial throne flourish eternally; let my masters and teachers through all the kalpas, my parents in my last seven incarnations, my brothers and sisters, my wife [wives?], sons, and daughters, as well as my good friends and acquaintances, and sentient beings everywhere [reading 邊地 as 遍地], reside forever in the Buddha-lands, and when Maitreya is reborn, in the three lectures under the nagapuspa tree, let them all rise to preeminence.”

There’s something beautifully gestural in the way this list, after an initial bow to the throne, sweeps from an imagined infinity of time (“my masters and teachers through all the kalpas”), to a finite but still impressive stretch of time (“my parents in my last seven incarnations”), and thence to the realm of ordinary experience: siblings, wives, children, and my favorite, good friends and acquaintances. (NGL, I also like “all my teachers throughout cosmic time”)

Finally the gesture, like a finishing brushstroke, turns outward again to encompass sentient beings everywhere, in the kind of “and everybody else too, while we’re at it” that often ends such inscriptions. All that said, I like that Wang Senghuan includes his friends and acquaintances specifically. Later texts, especially the well-known bylaws of women’s associations from the Dunhuang library cave (7th-10th centuries), refer explicitly to affective bonds of friendship, just as Wang Senghuan does here. There’s a great (open-source!) article by Buzzy Teiser on these bylaws and the ideas about friendship they embody.