TY - JOUR
T1 - Inscribing the corpus
T2 - Scribal and ritual practice in the material culture of dunhuang
AU - Dachille, Rae
N1 - Funding Information:
I am grateful to Dr. Jacob Dalton for his guidance in navigating and interpreting the Dunhuang manuscripts, to Dr. Patricia Berger for introducing me to theories for exploring the interpenetration of text and image at Dunhuang, to Dr. Christian Luczanits for feeding my curiosity about idiosyncrasies in the visual realm, and to Dr. Sam van Schaik for accessing the manuscript on my behalf. Thanks to the Townsend Center for the Humanities at UC Berkeley for funding the initial phase of this research and to fellow presenters at the Buddhist Book Cultures Symposium at the University of Denver in April 2017 for their feedback on the project.
Publisher Copyright:
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020
PY - 2020
Y1 - 2020
N2 - Qualities of the written sign impact the process of parsing a text, of making it accessible for vision, contemplation, recitation, and memory. In this article, I approach the manuscript as a visual field ordered by the configuration, combination, and differentiation of marks. This approach considers the particular challenges and potentialities that the space of the manuscript presents to a scribe as well as to a reader and how this blurs the boundaries between text and image. Through a case study of a Tibetan ritual manual, I illuminate the act of inscription as a technology with material, ritual, mnemonic, and pedagogical applications.
AB - Qualities of the written sign impact the process of parsing a text, of making it accessible for vision, contemplation, recitation, and memory. In this article, I approach the manuscript as a visual field ordered by the configuration, combination, and differentiation of marks. This approach considers the particular challenges and potentialities that the space of the manuscript presents to a scribe as well as to a reader and how this blurs the boundaries between text and image. Through a case study of a Tibetan ritual manual, I illuminate the act of inscription as a technology with material, ritual, mnemonic, and pedagogical applications.
KW - Art history
KW - Buddhism
KW - Dunhuang
KW - Esoteric drawings
KW - Manuscript culture
KW - Ritual writing
KW - Scribal practice
KW - Tibetan Buddhism
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U2 - 10.1163/15685276-12341570
DO - 10.1163/15685276-12341570
M3 - Review article
AN - SCOPUS:85091092380
VL - 67
SP - 113
EP - 137
JO - Numen
JF - Numen
SN - 1568-5276
IS - 2-3
ER -