. esoteric buddhism under the chosn 629
or bronze. Inside we find among other things the five mirrors, the five
precious substances, the five types of grains, printed mandalas, and
prayer text.^25 Among the important items included with the pokchang,
the prayer text or record of the event usually states the reason for the
making of the image in question, what religious merit the donor(s)
hope to gain from their pious work, who participated and when, as
well as a complete list of all the holy items placed inside the image.^26
During the Chosŏn the process by which a given pokchang was made
reveals a certain structural uniformity, although some regional variet-
ies have been reported.
It is interesting to observe that the votive paintings made during the
Chosŏn were subjected to the same ritual proceedings of empower-
ment as that which took place for “vitalizing” images. The pokchang
used for paintings comes in two varieties. One, the most common
type, is made of silk or some other kind of fabric, which is in fact a
large-sized, tortoise-shaped purse of the kind traditionally worn by
women in dynastic Korea.^27 The second type consists of a flat, circular
box made of wood or papier-mâché covered with a canvas-like fabric
on which the Siddham letter ā is written. These pokchang to empower
paintings contain more or less the same items as the larger ones made
for the three-dimensional images.
Again it is in the context of empowerment and related practices that
we encounter graphic mandalas, talismans, and other magical charts.
In a sense most of these items are ritualistic in nature—if not in ori-
gin—and should therefore be foremost understood in the context of
Buddhist practice.
The Chosang kyŏng discussed above contains graphic representa-
tions of mandalas and mantric diagrams, including the Paryŏp tae
hongryŏn chi t’o (Chart of the Great Red Lotus
(^25) For a discussion of this practice, see Sørensen 2003.
(^26) That the size and contents of a given pokchang is relative to the size of the
image in question is obvious. However, the relative sizes do not signify a degree in
the empowerment of the image. Recently a large set of images of the Four Heavenly
Kings from Porim Temple in South Chŏlla province empowered during the
mid-Chosŏn was found to contain very substantial pokchangs, including 146 volumes
of Buddhist scriptures. For a report of this find, see Ch’ŏi 1995.
(^27) For these purses, see Whang 1987, 114, pl. 90. For a representative photo of a
pokchang from the Chosŏn to be hung on a painting, see Sŏngbo munhwa chaepo
chun yŏn’guwŏn 1995, 118. General information on Buddhist ritual implements can
be found in Tongguk taehakkyo p’anmulgwan, T’ongdo sa, and Kungnip minsok
p’anmulgwan 1995.