Caves of the Thousand Buddhas: Art and Buddhist Devotion Along the Silk Roads

China and the West: Cultural Dialogues Series

Over the course of the 2021-2022 academic year, the Future of the Humanities Project is sponsoring a series of webinars on the Christian literary imagination in collaboration with Blackfriars Hall, University of Oxford and The Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding (SACU).

Friday 21st January

Caves of the Thousand Buddhas: Art and Buddhist Devotion Along the Silk Roads

Located in present-day Gansu Province in northwestern China, the Mogao Caves at Dunhuang were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1987. Nearly 500 man-made caves carved into mountain cliffs between the fourth to fourteenth centuries were painted with Buddhist murals and installed with clay icons. In her talk, Michelle C. Wang will provide an overview of the architecture and art of the Mogao Caves and focus on one popular motif, the “Thousand Buddhas.” Comprised of repeated images of seated Buddhas, the Thousand Buddhas motif opens onto Buddhist concepts of time and cosmology, artistic patronage, and the artist’s practice at Dunhuang. Wang’s presentation will be followed by a Q&A moderated by Michael Scott.

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Michelle C. Wang is an associate professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Georgetown University and a specialist in the Buddhist and silk road art of northwestern China, primarily of the sixth to tenth centuries. Her first book Mandalas in the Making: The Visual Culture of Esoteric Buddhism at Dunhuang (2018) examines Buddhist mandalas of the eighth to tenth centuries at the Mogao and Yulin Buddhist cave shrines in northwestern China. In addition to her research on mandalas, she has also written about art and ritual, miracle tales of animated statues, the transcultural reception of Buddhist motifs, and text and image. Her current work concerns Buddhist sculpture and materiality.

Michael Scott (moderator) is Fellow and Senior Dean at Blackfriars Hall, Oxford. He is also senior adviser to the president of Georgetown University and leads the Future of the Humanities Project. He has previously served as pro vice chancellor at De Montfort University, Leicester, and was the founding vice chancellor of Wrexham Glyndwr University. His books include studies in Shakespeare and his contemporaries and in twentieth century theatre. He has been a fellow and visiting professor at two Chinese universities and published a book on King Arthur with the Foreign Research and Teaching Press in Beijing.

Contact:
Las Casas Institute with Georgetown University
lascasas@bfriars.ox.ac.uk