628 henrik h. sørensenthe culmination of the empowerment of a given Buddhist image or
votive painting. Although the origin of this practice has been lost in
the mist of history, it can at least be documented as far back as the
Tang dynasty in China.^24Esoteric Buddhist Arcana
While Esoteric Buddhist practices and beliefs dominated Chosŏn
dynasty ritual texts as we have seen above, we find that exoteric Bud-
dhist rites, such as those centering on Amitābha, Avalokiteśvara, or the
Sŏn patriarchs, continued with unabated vigor. On the basis of sources
going back to the early Koryŏ (and probably earlier), the empowering
of Buddhist cult images and paintings was effectuated through a ritual
in which a conglomeration of objects (including precious substances,
painted or printed mandalas, grain, holy scriptures, etc.) were gathered
together to form a pokchang, the “abdomen” (literally, “intestines”) of
the object. The ritual process through which an image is empowered is
described in detail in the important ritual manual, the Chosang kyŏng,
discussed above. A survey of this text reveals that the underlying beliefs
and practices it endorses revolve around a number of canonical, mainly
Esoteric Buddhist scriptures from Tang China. Hence it is not surpris-
ing to find the fivefold ritual structure associated with the five buddha
families set forth in this text as part of the creation of the pokchang.
Spells were used throughout the empowerment and sometimes writ-
ten on the pokchang as well as on the image itself. The pokchang used
for images vary according to the size of the image in question, but is
usually made by filling the hollow inside of the image made of wood
(^24) Although we do not know for certain how the earliest form(s) of the rite was
performed, it is certain that the ritual was systematized during the first half of the
eighth century in the context of the evolved type of Indo-Chinese Esoteric Buddhism
as taught by the three ācāryas, Śubhākarasiṃha (637–735), Vajrabodhi (669–741), and
Amoghavajra (705–774). See Orzech, “Esoteric Buddhism in the Tang: From Atikūta ̣
to Amoghavajra (651–780),” and Pinte, Orzech, and Lehnert on the three ācāryas
respectively, all in this volume. The ritual for “opening the light” was transmitted to
the Korean Peninsula by pilgrim-monks from early on and was probably known in
the Silla kingdom as early as the mid-eighth century. In any case, textual evidence
from the following Koryŏ dynasty reveals that the rite in some form was practiced
there during the tenth century. However, we have to proceed further on in the his-
tory of Koryŏ Buddhism in order to have solid evidence for the prevalence of the
chŏm’an ritual. Henceforth, the manner in which the ritual was performed during the
Chosŏn followed more or less the instructions left behind by the ritual specialists of
the Koryŏ.