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 Buddhist Sarvāstivāda sequences with some hints of Mahāyāna or Tantric themes). As with certain Mahāyāna ontologies, the Qizil Yoga Manual meditations emphasize an expansive spatiality, employing a densely populated mental landscape in which images abound. Since visualization requires blank space for projection/construction (whether mental space or the space of the cave), one result is the spatialisation of time. 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’. 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, a ‘semiotic triangle’ is proposed to acknowledge how ‘mental imagery’ is produced triadically by text, cave and body. Since the primary 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 ‘readerly blanks’ be filled in. The goals of this paper are to deepen an ontological understanding of the practices in the Qizil Yoga Manual, and to show how historical textual research in religious studies can be underpinned by methods that are bolder in their theoretical scope, moving beyond the remit of translation projects.