The Five-Colored Clouds of Mount Wutai: Poems from Dunhuang

In The Five-Colored Clouds of Mount Wutai: Poems from Dunhuang, Mary Anne Cartelli examines a set of poems from the Dunhuang manuscripts about Mount Wutai, the most sacred mountain in Chinese Buddhism. Dating from the Tang and Five Dynasties periods, they reflect the mountain’s transformation into the home of the bodhisattva Mañjuśrī, and provide important literary evidence for the development of Buddhism in China. This interdisciplinary study analyzes the poems using Buddhist scriptures and pilgrimage records, as well as the contemporaneous wall-painting of Mount Wutai in Dunhuang cave 61. The poems demonstrate how the mountain was created as a sacred Buddhist space, as their motifs reflect the cosmology associated with the mountain by the Tang dynasty, and they vividly portray the experience of the pilgrim traveling through a divinely empowered landscape.

Mary Anne Cartelli, Ph.D. (1999) in East Asian Languages and Cultures, Columbia University, is Assistant Professor of Chinese at Hunter College of the City University of New York. Her research interests include Dunhuang literature, Silk Road culture and medieval Chinese literature.

'..this is a book of solid scholarship, providing information on the colorful world of medieval Chinese Buddhist pilgrimage and popular belief in Mañjuśrī and Mt. Wutai, as well as insights into the history of popular Chinese Buddhist poetry.'
John Jorgensen, H-Buddhism, H-Net Reviews. August, 2013.

'The author’s familiarity with the legends about this place compiled between the late seventh century and the early Qing (1644–1911) is impressive.
Drawing on materials that both predate and long postdate the poems’ compilation and first circulation, Cartelli deftly unpacks each reference in the poems and provides a rich sense of the imagining of the mountain shaping and shaped by the poetry (...) the bibliography—like The Five-Colored Clouds of Mount Wutai itself—is an invaluable resource for scholars and students of Buddhist studies, Tang history, Chinese literature, art history, and sacred place.'
Susan Andrews, Journal of Asian Studies, 73 (2014)