Detail. Frontispiece to the Lotus Sutra, juan 1. Illustrated by Wang Yi. Southern Song. Woodblock print. Concertina. © National Palace Museum.

The Dynamic Spread of Buddhist Print Culture in China and Beyond

A Global Middle Ages lecture

This lecture explores the dynamic spread of Buddhist print culture in China and beyond, drawing on a wealth of printed books—many bearing illustrations—that were discovered in remote archaeological sites, retrieved from inside statues, or found in museum collections. Shih-shan Susan Huang examines Buddhist woodcuts not merely as static cultural relics but holistically within multicultural contexts and as objects on the move, transmitted across a sprawling web of transnational networks, “Buddhist Book Roads.” Prime examples include: the world’s earliest dated printed book, the Diamond Sutra (868), discovered in Dunhuang’s “library cave” in northwest China; artistic editions of the Lotus Sutra, produced during the Song (960–1279) and Yuan (1279–1368) dynasties in southern China, in the thriving printing center of Hangzhou, and later widely circulated throughout Japan, Korea, and Central Asia; and the Dharani Sutra, which became extremely popular in fifteenth-century Beijing, especially among female donors, for its acclaimed protective and healing powers addressing childbirth complications. Huang will explore these examples and trace the spread of Buddhist woodblock images beyond Asia, reaching European audiences by the seventeenth century where they were seen as prime visual examples of Chinese art, religion, and culture.
Shih-shan Susan Huang (PhD, history of art, Yale) is an associate professor at Rice University’s newly founded Department of Transnational Asian Studies. Her first book, Picturing the True Form: Daoist Visual Culture in Traditional China (Harvard Asian Center, 2012; Chinese translation published by Zhejiang University Press, 2022), investigates the long-neglected visual culture of Daoism, China’s primary indigenous religion. She coedited Visual and Material Cultures of the Middle Period China with Patricia Ebrey (Brill, 2017). Huang’s second monograph, The Dynamic Spread of Buddhist Print Culture: Mapping Buddhist Book Roads in China and its Neighbors, forthcoming in 2024 as part of the Brill series Crossroads—History of Interaction across the Silk Routes, examines a vast selection of Buddhist printed images and texts, not merely as static cultural relics but holistically within multicultural contexts related to other cultural products, and as objects on the move, transmitted across a sprawling web of transnational networks, “Buddhist Book Roads.” For more information, visit https://shihshansusanhuang.com.