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Abstract
The Thousand-armed Manjusri is an enigmatic form of the bodhisattva that appeared primarily in the Mogao cave shrines in northwestern China. There, the deity was nearly always paired with the Thousand-armed Avalokitesvara on opposite walls or on opposite sides of a doorway. Curiously, this pairing is absent from any of the Buddhist sutras associated with the two. This article argues that texts were a starting point rather than an end point for the establishment of the Thousand-armed Manjusri's iconographic characteristics, and that the pairing of the two deities is crucial for understanding the gaps between the deity's textual description and its visual representation.
KEYWORDS: Thousand-armed Manjusri, Thousand-armed Avalokitesvara, Manjusri, Avalokitesvara, Mt. Wutai, Dunhuang, Mogao caves, mural painting, Buddhist painting, Buddhist art, esoteric Buddhism, Huayan Buddhism
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Introduction
The nature of the dialogue between text and image has consistently challenged scholars of Buddhist visual culture. At the Mogao cave shrines ... in Dunhuang, Gansu Province, in northwestern China, the mural paintings from nearly five hundred cave shrines are joined by more than fifty thousand manuscripts and portable paintings recovered in the early twentieth century from the so-called library cave, Mogao Cave 17. Previous scholarship interrogated the relationship between a particular genre of popular narrative literature known as bianwen ... (transformation text), as represented in the Dunhuang manuscript cache, and Buddhist pictorial compositions called bianxiang (transformation tableaux), which are preserved in the mural paintings of the Mogao cave shrines. Challenging the then-prevailing scholarly assumption that transformation tableaux served as visual aids for oral recitations of transformation texts, Wu Hung argued persuasively for the crucial distinctions between literary and pictorial narratives, concluding not only that it was unlikely that transformation tableaux served as visual aids, but also that their innate pictorial logic in turn shaped the composition of transformation texts.1
But what about the relationship between Buddhist texts and painted icons? This essay explores the pictorial logic of mural paintings depicting Manjusri of the Thousand Arms and Thousand Begging Bowls (Qianbi qianbo Wenshushili pusa ... [hereafter the Thousand-armed Manjusri, Fig. 1) and examines the reasons behind its pairing with Avalokitesvara of the Thousand Arms and Thousand Eyes (Qianshou qianyan Guanshiyin pusa ... [hereafter the Thousand-armed Avalokitesvara], Fig. 2). The little-studied Thousand-armed...