3: Travel and Transformation in the Yandang Mountains

This reception study argues a 1316 handscroll illustrating the Yandang mountains 雁蕩山 in Zhejiang Province was used by fifteenth-and-sixteenth-century-viewers as part of their contemplative practice to achieve relief from the ailments of old age. The scroll combines paintings of the famous topography of the mountain range with prose and poetry inscriptions to immerse viewers in a visual and literary journey through both its extraordinary landscape features and mythic Buddhist history. Viewers engaged in separate experiences of the landscape when the scroll was unrolled and another set as it was rerolled. Viewers unrolling the scroll traveled through the topographical identity and religious history of the site as they gained a somaesthetic understanding of its geography. Rerolling the scroll prompted a transformative response by these same viewers because the pictures and texts cued them to engage in the fully interactive meditational practices of walking and seated meditation associated with the Chan Buddhist founder of the range, Nakula. The circumstances of the colophonists who wrote on the scroll suggest they sought a transformative encounter of the scroll by applying their knowledge of the curative history of the mountain range to the scroll’s painted imagery. Analysis of this scroll and the later writings attached to it allow us to reconstitute a rare and authentic episode in the larger tradition of engagement with landscape that promoted belief in the restorative powers of mind journeys through painted landscapes.