Sacralizing Mount Lu: Monastic Practice, Textual Construction, and Cultural Memory in Medieval China

Mount Lu’s transformation from a natural landscape into a Buddhist sacred space provides an important case for understanding how sacred geography was produced in medieval China. Rather than treating sacredness as an inherent quality of a place or as the product of textual representation alone, this article argues that Mount Lu was sacralized through the historical interaction of monastic practice, textual production, and cultural memory. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s theory of the production of space, the study examines how Huiyuan (334–416) and his community redefined Mount Lu through monastic settlement, ritual activity, institutional formation, and cultural authority centered on Donglin Temple. It further analyzes how historiographical writing, literary representation, and intertextual circulation extended the mountain’s religious significance beyond the monastic community and consolidated it within broader traditions of literati culture. In this process, Mount Lu became not only a Buddhist sacred site but also a durable site of memory onto which Buddhist, Daoist, and Confucian meanings could be projected and renegotiated. By tracing the interaction between embodied religious practice and textual transmission, this article shows that the sacralization of Mount Lu was neither a spontaneous religious phenomenon nor simply the result of state designation, but rather a cumulative historical achievement shaped by monastic initiative, literary circulation, and the long-term work of cultural remembrance.