What Was in the “Precious Casket Seal”?: Material Culture of the Karaṇḍamudrā Dhāraṇī throughout Medieval Maritime Asia

Material evidence from late medieval China attests that Buddhist of the Wuyue kingdom and Liao empire participated in the pan-Buddhist practice of dhāraṇīs and, more specifically, the cult of textual relics. What formed the basis of the cult is the Sūtra of theDhāraṇī of the Precious Casket Seal of...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Religions
Main Author: Lee, Seunghye (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: MDPI [2021]
In: Religions
Year: 2021, Volume: 12, Issue: 1
Further subjects:B complete-body relics
B cult of textual relics
B Stūpa
B relics of the dharma
B Buddhism
B Amoghavajra
B Karaṇḍamudrā Sūtra
B Consecration
B pratītyāsamutpādagāthā
B Dhāraṇī
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Summary:Material evidence from late medieval China attests that Buddhist of the Wuyue kingdom and Liao empire participated in the pan-Buddhist practice of dhāraṇīs and, more specifically, the cult of textual relics. What formed the basis of the cult is the Sūtra of theDhāraṇī of the Precious Casket Seal of the Concealed Complete-body Relics of the Essence of All Tathāgatas. I argue that the rhetoric of completeness, which is brought to the fore in the sutra’s title and reiterated throughout the text, lay at the heart of the success that it achieved. I trace the transfer of the text from South Asia to East Asia along the maritime routes, while closely examining designs and material forms, and various structuring contexts of the text. By doing so, I contribute to the scholarship on the cult of dhāraṇīs as relics of the dharma across Buddhist Asia.
ISSN:2077-1444
Contains:Enthalten in: Religions
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.3390/rel12010013