Filling in the Blanks::The Material Semiotics of Visual Meditation in the Buddhist Qizil Yoga Manual

This paper analyses the ‘grammar’, or rules, of meditation practice in the c. 5th-century Qizil Yoga Manual (QYM). The QYM was found in Kucha, a significant location in the Silk Road trade network. Meditation in this text means visual recollection, and the practices are largely structured around Sarvāstivāda sequences with some hints of Mahāyāna or Tantric themes (Schlingloff 2006; Ruegg 1967; Yamabe 1999a; Yamabe 1999b: 2, fn 1; Bretfeld 2003; Dhammajoti 2021; O’Brien-Kop 2022; Abe 2024). As with certain Mahāyāna ontologies (McMahan 2005: 79), the Qizil Yoga Manual meditations emphasize an expansive spatiality, employing ‘a great deal of visionary material depicting fantastic apparitions and otherworldly scenes’ (McMahan 2022: 2). Since visualization requires blank space for projection/construction (whether mental space or the space of the cave), one result is ‘the spatialisation of time – assimilating temporality to the always present dimension of space’ (McMahan 2002: 80). Nonetheless, the QYM is not a text in which temporality is dispensed with, and the meditation formulas also retain a more restrained Sarvāstivāda manual emphasis on visual elements arising and disappearing in temporal sequence – such as we find in the Abhidharmakośabhāṣya or early Sarvāstivāda layers of the Yogācārabhūmiśāstra, such as the ‘Śrāvakabhūmi’ (O’Brien-Kop 2021). To address the interplay of image proliferation and temporal sequence in the text, this paper engages semiotics, or the study of sign systems. Drawing on both linguistic and visual approaches, the paper engages a ‘semiotic triangle’ (Semetsky 2019) that acknowledges how ‘mental imagery’ (Nanay 2021) is produced triadically by text, cave and body. Since the sole surviving manuscript of the Qizil Yoga Manual is fragmentary, its meaning can be hard to discern, made doubly so by the distinct cultural character of this Central Asian Buddhist Sanskrit text. Moreover, only when the material context of the manuscript is highlighted, taking into account embodied cave meditation, can the less literal readerly blanks be filled in. The goal of this analysis is to deepen an ontological understanding of the practices in the Qizil Yoga Manual.