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This study examines how the Roman Catholic Church formulated and implemented its principal directive during China’s civil war and subsequent regime change in the mid-twentieth century, particularly the obligation that clergy remain at their posts alongside the relocation of seminarians to safer areas. Drawing on newly available Vatican archival materials, it demonstrates that the decision to evacuate seminarians was not solely prompted by the petition of the first Chinese cardinal to the pope, as previously assumed; rather, the Apostolic Internuncio’s shift in position played a decisive role. It further identifies an original Italian version of the directive that differs in sequence and emphasis from the widely circulated Chinese text. Against this background, criticisms of the Internuncio as “the executioner of native priests” require reconsideration. Rather, the study reinterprets him as an adaptive intermediary within the process of policy formation and implementation.

Archaeological reports show that about 70% of Han dynasty pictorial stone sites feature historical figures, revealing a significant yet understudied aspect of tomb ritual practice (muji yishi). This study examines how these depictions may reflect ritual characteristics and their relationship to temple ritual practice (miaoji yishi). From the Qin to Han period (221 BCE–220 CE), tomb and temple rituals increasingly converged; temple rituals were sometimes performed by tombs, and the imagery incorporated cosmological models alongside representations of daily life, including clothing, diet, dwellings, and mobility. The historical figures depicted can be grouped into three categories: emperors and sages, loyal ministers and righteous heroes, and filial sons and chaste women. These figures were closely associated with ideals of transcendence and immortality, suggesting a ritual framework that connected temple and tomb practices, with emperors and sages appearing most frequently, accounting for about 80% of the depictions. Notably, these images occur predominantly in commoners’ tombs (approximately 95%), where fewer social restrictions may have allowed greater creative freedom. While research on tomb ritual practices has traditionally relied on textual sources, the present study emphasizes archaeological evidence, offering an analytical perspective on the relationship between temple and tomb rituals in Han funeral art and highlighting their potential role in shaping Han ritual logic and religious expression.

The Japanese scholar and art critic Okakura Tenshin traveled to colonial India from January to September 1902 and made three visits to the Buddhist holy site of Bodh Gaya. There, he attempted to purchase a piece of land from the landowner, the Mahant, to build a vihāra (resthouse) for Japanese Buddhist devotees. His purchase request was rejected by the British colonial authority for his foreigner status, despite no legal prohibition against land sales to foreigners under Bodh Gaya’s land management laws at the time. The year after his journey to India, Okakura Tenshin published The Ideals of the East, wherein the renowned declaration that “Asia is one” subsequently evolved to be the intellectual cornerstone of twentieth-century Asianism (or Pan-Asianism). How did Okakura’s Indian journey and his experience of the failed attempt to purchase land in Bodh Gaya catalyze his conception of “Asia is One”? This essay first traces the Buddhist revival movements in late nineteenth-century India and Japan, elucidating how Buddhism helped forge a sense of transnational solidarity between the two nations, which Okakura also embraced. It then examines Okakura’s trip to India and his plan to purchase land at Bodh Gaya, uncovering the underlying geopolitical struggle between the British Empire and the New Asian Power Japan. In this context, the analysis will show that Okakura’s frustrating experience of failed land purchase underscored for him the necessity for the solidarity between Japan and India and the need for a unitary idea of Asia to articulate that solidarity. Finally, a comparative textual analysis between The Ideals of the East (1903) and Okakura’s “History of Japanese Art” lectures given at the Tokyo Fine Arts School before his trip to India explicates how Buddhism, which was being revived by a collective of various groups in and outside its place of origin India, served as a cohesive discursive agent in Okakura’s construction of the narrative of an Asian unity. This Buddhist framework helped Okakura to reconstruct the interlinked cultural histories of India, China, and Japan into a unified notion of Asia within which he crystallized a unique and favored cultural identity for Japan.

This paper draws on Michel Foucault’s analysis of disciplinary power to examine the history of penal punishment and Buddhist chaplaincy at Lüshun Prison in Dalian during Japan’s colonial rule (1905–1945). The goal is to call into question the dominant understanding of Japanese prison system as simply an apparatus of naked colonial oppression by exploring the contradictions and limitations in the penitentiary system of Japan as an empire and a modern nation-state. The research is based on official prison documents, True Pure Land Buddhist Honganji sect archival sources, local Chinese publications, oral testimonies from the 2000s, interviews with descendants, and fieldwork at Lüshun Prison. The first part introduces the history of Lüshun Prison and the second explains the prison as a modern criminal justice institution embodying the Benthamian panopticon principle and modern disciplinary power. The third part examines the brutal corporeal punishment at Lüshun Prison and explores how the prison combined deliberate strategies of disciplining manipulation with bodily punishment to (re)create disciplined and subjected individuals. The fourth and fifth parts focus on Buddhist chaplaincy at Lüshun Prison as a disciplining practice. The fourth considers the limits of Buddhist chaplaincy by showing the depoliticized Buddhist doctrine deployed by chaplains was unable to discipline prisoners as it failed to make them repent and be loyal subjects of imperial Japan. The notion of public good used to justify Buddhist chaplaincy in Japan loses its political meaning when applied to the colonial penitentiary setting of Lüshun Prison. The fifth part further explores this ambiguity in Buddhist chaplaincy by focusing on examining the case of Ahn Jung-geun, the Korean independence activist who assassinated the Japanese statesman Ito Hirobumi and was imprisoned and executed at Lüshun Prison in 1910. Rather than transforming Ahn, prison chaplains ended up being transformed by him. This reversion betrays not just a tension between the private and the public, or the individual and the social, but at the same time a tension between the supposedly homogenized nation-state and the multi-ethnic empire.

This paper focuses on the early Qing monk-painter Hongren 弘仁, systematically exploring the pathways through which the Chan Buddhist “emptiness contemplation” is manifested in his landscape paintings. As a representative monk-painter, Hongren produced works that profoundly embody the Chan contemplation of emptiness, yielding a singular style defined by austere coldness, minimalist simplicity, and profound quietude. Transcending conventional stylistic descriptions in art history and essentialist philosophical deductions, this study adopts a comprehensive empirical approach that integrates poetry, calligraphy, painting, and seals (shi-shu-hua-yin 诗书画印). By adopting an interdisciplinary perspective of philosophy, religion, and art history, this study argues that Hongren’s landscapes are not merely subjective emotional expressions or aesthetic pursuits; rather, they constitute a visual extension and a spiritual externalization of his emptiness contemplation. Through a multi-layered analysis of his form, brushwork, composition, and artistic conception, combined with the mutual corroboration of poetic inscriptions on paintings and textual inscriptions on seals, this paper reveals how the Chan philosophy of “emptiness contemplation” is reflected within his artistic language. While Hongren’s style is the cumulative result of various factors such as the Ming-Qing dynasty transition, his personal life, the inheritance of painting techniques, and the regional culture of Mount Huang, this paper specifically takes Chan thought as its analytical starting point, focusing on its unique expression in his work. Hongren’s path of “Painting-Chan” (hua chan 画禅) not only infused early Qing painting with a sublime spiritual power but also provides a vital religious exegesis of the deep-seated Chinese tradition of “Technique Ascending to the Dao” (ji jin yu dao 技进于道).

This article studies the unique funerary decorative and architectural programs of the Foyemiaowan tombs in Dunhuang, dating to the third and fourth centuries CE. While Dunhuang is known for its later Buddhist grottoes, its sophisticated pre-Buddhist religious landscape remains understudied. This article focuses on the elaborate screen walls constructed of painted pictorial bricks, which represent the celestial realm designed to visualize the soul’s transcendence to heaven. Based on iconographic analysis, this study discusses the highlighted decorative design of screen wall at Foyemiaowan and explains the different artistic logics behind the lavish exterior decoration of Foyemiaowan vis-à-vis the interior-focused programs of neighboring sites like Xincheng in Jiayuguan. This study situates visual and material symbols in the distinct arrangement of the whole tomb space, which together reflect local adoption and innovation of Central Plain traditions in Early Medieval Dunhuang.

The representations of a Buddha flanked on either side by Brahmā and Indra from Gandhāra have long been identified as the iconography of “Entreaty to Teach,” an episode in the Buddha’s life. After he obtained enlightenment, Śākyamuni had planned to enter nirvana immediately but Brahmā and Indra persuaded the Buddha to teach the Dharma for the sake of sentient beings. This subject is quite prominent in Gandhāran Buddhist art. It appears among a group of earliest anthropomorphic representations of the Buddha. It is one of the first events singled out from the Buddha’s life to be represented with the Buddha image; this event does not glorify the Buddha, but rather contaminates his imagery somewhat. In fact, pairing Brahmā and Indra on either side of a main figure became very common later in Gandhāran, art and it also appears in other iconographies. Were these images meant only to represent the narrative of “Entreaty to Teach?” This study reassesses this well-known iconography in both visual and textual traditions. Challenging current identification in the field, the author suggests the possibility that this iconography represents an iconic image of the Buddha that is meant to glorify the Buddha by subordinating the top two Brahmanic gods as his attendants.

The Diocese of Macao was established on 23 January 1576, becoming the Holy See’s first base of operation in the Far East.

For three centuries, the former Portuguese colony of Macau served as the gateway into mainland China and the locale for the development of an Asian Catholic culture that encompassed distinctive musical practices and styles. Macau and Catholic Music Across the Sino-Western Divide draws extensively upon historical documents in Chinese and Portuguese for a polylingual approach to Catholic sacred music. Jen-yen Chen follows this music from the sixteenth century through the twentieth by reading literary accounts of sound, primary source documents, and musical notation to examine the impacts of linguistic, political, and cultural divides and the ways sounds have traveled across these divides. Chen covers Chinese responses to Western sounds in Macau and southern China, illuminating the strategies for the use of sounds and musicking adopted by Jesuit missionaries; and the complexities of identity formation negotiated by Macau Catholics who confront exceptionalist historical discourses of Chinese or Portuguese “greatness.” Drawing from sound studies and musicological methods, Chen argues that Chinese descriptions of Catholic sounds in Macau, including the ringing of church bells, the playing of the organ, and choral singing, illuminate spatial, sonic, and ideological mobilities that reconfigure Chinese and European identities. Macau and Catholic Music Across the Sino-Western Divide also extends to contemporary times to explore how present day members of Macau’s Catholic community position themselves in relation to the historical narratives often told about their city, cultivating a rich individuality of identity that refuses conformity to fixed notions of Asianness or Westernness.