#  “Sacred Landscape for Women’s Salvation: Tang (618–907) Burial Practices at the Longmen Grottoes” 

 



**Zhu Pinyan (Assistant Professor, Kent State University) - “Sacred Landscape for Women’s Salvation: Tang (618–907) Burial Practices at the Longmen Grottoes”**

Like many other famous sites of Buddhist caves in China, the Longmen Grottoes was also a burial ground in the Tang (618–907) period. While donors dug the living cliffs to enshrine Buddhist statues, a few women in the seventh and eighth centuries excavated chambers on and near the cliffs to inter their own remains. In their tomb epitaphs, these women prayed to be separated from their husband’s family and to remain close to the Buddha and Buddhist masters. Contextualizing these pronounced justifications with two local tales of miraculous events, I argue that they reveal a common dilemma faced by Buddhist lay women in the early Tang: whereas young girls were imagined turning into seductive spirits, married women were expected to maintain her spousal and parental ties in the afterlife. Such posthumous imaginations created the urgency for women to proclaim socially acceptable alternatives to a conventional joint burial with their husbands. As a result, these women made the choice of preparing for their own burial in the sacred landscape of Longmen, and thereby literally connecting themselves to the community of their Buddhist teachers and colleagues.