Title

Encountering Traces in Zhendan: Daoxuan’s Stupa Narratives in Ji Shenzhou Sanbao Gantong Lu and Their Contemporaneity

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Genre

Pages

377-407

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Language

Chinese

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Abstract

This paper examines twenty stupa-related accounts in the upper fascicle of Daoxuan’s 道宣 (596–667) Ji Shenzhou Sanbao gantong lu 集神州三宝感通錄 (Record of the Miraculous Resonances of the Three Treasures in China), and explores how Daoxuan employs stupa narratives to reconstruct the Buddha’s sacred presence in Zhendan 震昋. The Buddhist stupa originated in India as an outgrowth of relic veneration. Tradition holds that King Aśoka 阿育王 (r. c. 268–c. 232 BCE) distributed relics and erected 84,000 stupas, nineteen of which were said to have manifested in China. Drawing on textual sources, oral traditions, and his own observations, Daoxuan records miraculous resonances and karmic conditions associated with these stupas, thereby shaping a localized sacred Buddhist landscape; he further deploys these narratives as a discursive strategy to establish Buddhism’s orthodoxy in China. In contrast to stupa-construction inscriptions (zaotaji 造塔記), which emphasize merit-making, and monastery inscriptions (siji 寺記), which document architectural forms and historical development, stupa-affiliation narratives (tayuan 塔缘) foreground miraculous manifestations. They highlight the numinous connections among stupas, relics, and devotees, thereby generating a religious temporality of “multiple presents” that transcends linear time. This paper further argues that such narrative practice embodies the Buddhist historiographical doctrine of ji 機 and shi 時 (karmic occasion and temporal conditions), through which the stupa functions as a medium of sacred presence linking past, present, and future, and thereby articulating a form of religious contemporaneity.