Visualizations of Mountain–Body Fusions in Medieval Chinese Philosophy, Art, and Religion

This paper examines how Chinese people affiliated with different religions and ideologies of the Song period (960–1279 CE) used artistic, literary and visual representations to merge mountains and the natural world with the human body. This fusion of natural and human worlds in representation appears in a variety of contexts, including paintings of famous Song landscape artists, writings of literati thinkers, architectural developments of Neo-Confucian scholars, body charts recorded in the Daoist Canon, and artwork connected to Chinese Buddhism. The paper asserts that Song Chinese people used art and other material objects not only for the purpose of representing the world in which they lived but also as a means of expressing, developing and empowering their religions and ideologies. So powerful were these material representations, in fact, that in certain cases, they may have acted as a primary conduit through which the religion or ideology was experienced. As the paper shows, the interaction between the non-material activity of visualization (how people create images in their minds) and representation (how people create material objects to reify the images in their minds) is often pivotal, as opposed to accessory, to some of the later ideological developments of the Chinese people.