Rock, Paper, Scissors: Durable Ephemera and Networks of Stone in Quanzhou’s Zhenguo Pagoda

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Building a pagoda mobilizes durable materials into architectonic form. But a pagoda may also incorporate likenesses of images and objects wrought in ephemeral materials, thus becoming a nexus of textual, pictorial, and formal transfer and intermedial preservation. This essay examines how, in the Zhenguo pagoda 鎮國塔 (lit. “Defender of the State Pagoda”) at the Kaiyuan temple in Quanzhou, Fujian, rock—covered with the imagery of paper (and other fugitive media) by means of scissors (or, more precisely, the carver’s knife)—preserved traces of evanescent forms. Specifically, it: articulates the relationship of paper-based editions of the Buddhist canon to the pagoda’s stone-carved narrative program; asserts the influence of logographic schema of printed-paper primers and locally known, silk-based court painting styles to the pagoda’s imagery; and contends that carved images of small, free-standing bronze (and stone) pagodas link the Zhenguo pagoda to overlapping local (Quanzhou), regional (Min-Yue/Fujian), imperial (Song-dynasty), and maritime (Indian Ocean) object networks. To test the hypothesis that the Zhenguo pagoda serves as a repository of, and lexicon for, now lost forms, this essay concludes by using the imagery of the Zhenguo pagoda to recover the iconography of a type of Quanzhou-specific Buddhist monument, the Stone Shoot (Shisun 石筍).