500 henrik h. sørensen
The Shuilu , or water and land ritual, came to the fore during
the Song, when different ritual traditions are known to have existed.^5
In the course of the Southern Song, the different traditions appear
to have coalesced in the Fajie shengdan shuilu shenghui xiu zhai yigui
(Ritual Proceedings of the Meager Feast
for the Holy and Worldly in the Dharmadhātu’s Exalted Assembly of
the Water and Land),^6 compiled by the Tiantai monk Zhipan
(fl. thirteenth century).^7 The complex and multifaceted ritual set forth
here involved a great amount of paraphernalia, including a set of large-
scale votive paintings depicting all the divine and ordinary beings of
the dharmadhātu to be displayed during the event.^8 Although no such
paintings are known to exist today, we can surmise that they did exist
originally, given the universal popularity of the Shuilu ritual. Rub-
bings from a set of stone slabs at Zhengjue Temple in Shanxi
that were engraved with the divinities depicted in the Shuilu paintings,
dating from the Northern Song or Jin, have been identified in recent
years (figure 1).^9 In order to gain an understanding of how these paint-
ings would have looked, we need to turn our attention to the extant
sets of Shuilu paintings from the Ming.^10
As is the case with Yunnan under the Dali kingdom, a local brand
of Esoteric Buddhism was developed in Sichuan during the course of
the Song dynasty. The Buddhist sculptural art at Mt. Bei , located
just outside of the county seat of Dazu, dates back to the late Tang,
(^5) Rituals of this kind or conceptually similar rites are known from the latter part
of the Tang, but exactly how or in what contexts they were performed have still not
been fully explored. There are some rudimentary ritual texts that relate to the Shu-
ilu from Dunhuang, probably dating from the Five Dynasties period (906–978), eg.
P. 3542 (1) and P. 3542 (2). Cf. Xie and Xie 2006, 40–48. It would appear that the
Yulanben jing (Ullambana Scripture) and possible the yankou-type
rituals were the actual forerunners of the more developed Shuilu rituals of the early
Song dynasty.
(^6) It is now represented by the heavily redacted version by the Ming master Zhuhong
(1535–1615). Cf. ZZ. (1975–1989) 1497.74, 784b–823a.
(^7) See Lye, “Song Tiantai Ghost-feeding Rituals,” in this volume.
(^8) See Stevenson 2001.
(^9) An interesting stele with an ingraved image of the Buddha commemorates the
setting up of a Shuilu ritual at Yanshan Temple in 1158 C.E. The text informs
us that the occasion for the rite was to honor the many war dead at the time of the
Jin takeover in northern China. Cf. Shanxi sheng gu jianzhu baohu yanjiu, comp. 1990,
3, pl. 120. 10
Such as the famous set of paintings from Baoning Temple. Cf. Shanxisheng
Bowuguan, comp. 1988.