A Home Away from Home: Institution, Spatiality, and Tiantai Buddhism in Tenth- and Eleventh-Century China

Abstract

This dissertation proposes a new approach to studying the Tiantai 天台 tradition of Chinese Buddhism, especially in the Tang-Song transition (10th–11th c.), through the lens of institutional and spatial legitimacy. Yet previous scholarship has largely overlooked these dimensions, focusing primarily on the tradition’s doctrine, practice, and central figures. Such issues, I contend, cannot be understood without grasping their social reality centered on the monastic institution and situated within different conceptions of place and space. I thus propose a theoretical framework along two axes of legitimacy: an institutional axis that moves from personal authority to abstract meritocracy, and a spatial axis that captures the tension between a site-specific conception of “place” and a universal, site-independent conception of “space.” In Chapter One, I trace the macro-level evolution from a site-specific Tiantai tradition to a universal institutional network of a Tiantai school by the early eleventh century. Drawing on hagiographies, temple steles, and institutional charters, I show how certain monasteries became sectarian institutions, regardless of historical association. I focus in particular on the oft-overlooked tenth-century monk Luoxi Yiji 螺溪義寂 (919–987), whose reestablishment of the tradition on Mt. Tiantai paved the way for the eventual scholastic meritocracy of the mature Tiantai school established by Siming Zhili 四明知禮 (960–1028) around 1010. In Chapters Two and Three, I turn my attention to the Upper Tianzhu Monastery (Shang tianzhu si 上天竺寺) in Hangzhou 杭州, writing a micro-historical case study of its eleventh-century history. Chapter Two critically examines the early mythical origin of the monastery and its religiously efficacious statue of the Bodhisattva Guanyin 觀音. Through a process of “vernacular cultic mimesis,” I argue that the cult was constructed in imitation of a neighboring Tiantai monastic community, yet articulated as a place-based autochthonous deity. Chapter Three tells the story of how the monastery came to be a Tiantai sectarian institution and of the pivotal role of the abbot Biancai Yuanjing 辯才元淨 (1011–1091). It argues that this brought about two institutional changes. Internally to Tiantai, it gave rise to an alternative model of institutional legitimacy, grounded in ritual efficacy rather than scholasticism. Externally, this Tiantai ritual mediator is distinguished from the Chan 禪 conception of abbot-as-medium. Yet, in a curious twist, when Yuanjing retired, he actively reshaped his identity into that of a medium, albeit one poetically embedded in the site-specific environment of his retirement cloister. Ultimately, this dissertation demonstrates that core elements of the Tiantai Buddhist tradition—including doctrine, ritual, and authority—cannot be understood in abstract isolation from the institutional structures and physical spaces they inhabit.