Imagine being transported across vast expanses of time to early medieval china. What would be one’s initial impressions of the Bodhisattva Dizang? Literary sources suggest that Dizang first appeared in China sometime in the late fourth or early fifth century, first as an audience bodhisattva—that is, a member of the entourage gracing the Buddha’s assemblies in the scriptures.¹ One also finds examples of Dizang’s appearance as an interlocutor posing questions to the person preaching a scripture.² However, in these passing references, Dizang exists only in name and no significant information is disclosed about him. The first substantive glimpses of...

Modern scholarship attributes the initial dissemination of the Dizang cult to the Teaching of Three Levels (Sanjie jiao) and cites Longmen sculptures and inscriptions as examples of Dizang worship in the seventh century. For example, theEncyclopedia of Religionsays of the early history of Dizang:

Knowledge of Ksitigarbha [Dizang] was probably introduced to China around 400, but there is no evidence that [Dizang] became an object of widespread devotion there until much later. An important stimulus for the popularity of faith in [Dizang]’s vows seems to have come from the San-chieh Chiao [Sanjie jiao] . . . a group...

Between the sixth and tenth centuries, a small corpus of scriptures foregrounding the Bodhisattva Dizang appeared in china. To a greater or lesser extent, this set of “Dizang scriptures” reflects broader patterns of religious and cultural amalgamation that existed at the time.¹ Each scripture connects Dizang to varied aspects of chinese religion that cannot be reduced to any singular theme. If not the focus of the scripture, Dizang appears frequently and the text endeavors to integrate Dizang worship with its main subject. According to this definition, those scriptures that mention Dizang’s name but do not treat the bodhisattva substantively will...

Written texts are not the sole medium in which religious negotiations and innovations take place. Visual and material objects document devotional practices that written records often overlook, especially forms of religious piety that take shape outside so-called orthodoxy and are thus marginalized by the elite clerics responsible for writing religious history. As discussed in part 1, Shaanxi iconography proved to be critical for elucidating seventhcentury Chinese Buddhists’ visualizations of Dizang Bodhisattva inspired by theScripture on the Ten Wheels. In this chapter, a wider range of art and inscriptions will be considered to amplify our knowledge of Dizang. Viewed through...

The need to move beyond an exclusive focus on the written word in the study of medieval religion and culture has been voiced repeatedly in modern scholarship. But the study of the oral aspect of medieval culture poses its own methodological problems. Aaron Gurevich, an expert in the field of western medieval popular culture, frames the problem as follows:

The oral tradition of the distant past could not be directly recorded, and everything we learn of it in the sources, the texts of the literary tradition, is only an indirect reflection. What is more, this reflection of the oral through...