Ritual Practices and Material Culture: The Provenance and Transformation of Stupas in Medieval China

This paper examines how Chinese people perceived and accepted Buddhist stupas in medieval China. Doctrinal and ritualistic developments can potentially contribute to the emergence of new ritual objects. Ideological connotations of stupas witnessed a transition associated with the transformation of the stupa cult in China. Stupa burial became progressively accessible to ordinary clerics and laypeople who showed sympathy with Buddhism. The similarity between stupas and tombs in terms of funerary function largely determined people's interpretations of stupas in the early medieval period. However, tombs cannot be the precise manifestation of stupas in medieval China. Stupas evolved into multidimensional meanings in medieval China. The perceptions of stupas witnessed an ongoing process of reconstruction, which reveals how cultural transmission and transformation work throughout history.