Postmortem Pilgrimage: The Journey to the West as Mortuary Rite - Prof. Dr. Benjamin Brose - University of Hamburg
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Postmortem Pilgrimage: The Journey to the West as Mortuary Rite
Xuanzang (600/602–664), the celebrated seventh-century Chinese cleric, pilgrim, and scholar, is
arguably the most famous monk in the two-thousand year history of Chinese Buddhism. His epic
seventeen-year pilgrimage from China to India, his close relationship with two Chinese emperors
after his return, his subsequent translation of hundreds of volumes of Sanskrit texts into Chinese,
and the influence of those translations and commentaries on Buddhist traditions throughout East
Asia have taken on mythic proportions in the literature, liturgy, theater, and popular culture of China
and neighboring countries.
After his death, Xuanzang was apotheosized as a powerful deity in China and came to be revered
as both an exorcistic spirit and as a guide for the souls of the dead. The historical evolution of
Xuanzang’s posthumous cult is closely related to the development of the famous Journey to the
West (Xiyou ji), a novel published anonymously in the late sixteenth-century. While the novel and its
antecedents have been studied by numerous scholars, the ritual roots of the narrative and its
relationship to the deified Xuanzang are not well known.
This talk draws on recently discovered ritual manuals, liturgies, and ethnographic accounts to explore
mortuary rites featuring Xuanzang and other figures from the Journey to the West story-cycle.