Methods Used by Monks to Build Holy Resorts in the Central Plaints: Spatial Analysis of the Formation of Manjusri Meso in Wutai Mountain in the early Tang Dynasty

After Buddha was brought down, all holy spirits went reclusive. Indian Buddhism declined in the Tang Dynasty. How to construct a Buddhist Holy Land in the Central Plaints disturbed the Buddhist monks in and outside China.One solution was to build a copy of the Snow-Mountain Holy Land in the Buddhist areas. At the beginning of the Tang Dynasty, Buddhist monks in and outside China managed to build in cooperation a Snow-Mountain Holy Land, Manjusri Bodhimanda, in the frontier Wutai Mountain from three spacial perspectives. Macroscopically, these monks incorporated the geographical information into the Chinese Buddhist scriptures and their prefaces when compiling, translating, and annotating the holy scriptures so that Manjuist blessings were brought into the Wutai Mountain. From the perspective of Buddhist Meso, local monks turned Wutai Montain into a Buddhist resort using as their model the Holy Land structure of the Five Snow-Mountain Peaks found in the Buddhist scriptures. Microscopically, monks turned the space of the Wutai Mountain into a sacred one by using as their instrument Emperor Xiao Wen of the Beiwei Dynasty and the induction of Manjuist. Generally speaking, Wutai Resort was only an ideal copy of the Five Snow-Montain Peaks produced by the monks in and outside China. In reality, the resort, as a spatial pattern of either a historical site or a place for rites, only had one peak instead of five. The Holy Resort built by the monks in and outside China satisfied the need of the Buddhist monks for independence and the need of the emperors to legitimate their power over the world as the “corporeal Buddha.” So behind the monk constructors was the emperor.