Sets of hanging scrolls that assemble the whole cosmos — Buddhas, Daoist gods, ancestors, and the hungry dead — for the Water-Land rite, Chinese religion's most inclusive ceremony of deliverance.
Tagged: Painting Temple/Shrine Medieval Liturgical Extant Universal Deliverance Water-Land Rite Daoism
Why It Stands Here
The Water-Land set is an altar you hang on walls: every rank of being, from the Buddhas down to the unclaimed dead, is painted, summoned, fed, and dismissed. Its iconography crosses Buddhist and Daoist lines because the rite's mercy is meant to cross them too.
The shuilu fahui, the Water-Land Dharma Assembly, is a multi-day ritual for the deliverance of all beings in water and on land, performed in Chinese Buddhist temples since the Song dynasty. Its altars are hung with painted sets — in the fullest form, over a hundred scrolls — depicting the assemblies of the Buddhas and bodhisattvas, the Daoist Three Officials, Confucian worthies, local gods, and the hungry ghosts the rite exists to save.
The most famous surviving set, 139 Ming-dynasty paintings from Baoning Temple in Shanxi, is a summit of Chinese religious art: court-quality figures in mineral color on silk, every deity named in a cartouche so the officiant can address the painted court by name. The scrolls are working liturgical instruments, stored rolled and hung only for the rite.
References
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