Oneiric Horizons and Dissolving Bodies: Buddhist Cave Shrine as Mirror Hall

Buddhist cave shrines in medieval China amount to an optical theatre. Tracing the history of these mirror halls, the author argues that the model of the mirror‐hall underlies the conception of Chinese Buddhist cave shrines. Focusing on an eighth‐century cave at Dunhuang, the author demonstrates that the murals covering its ceiling slopes and walls combine to map out a temporal‐spatial continuum that encompasses vast imaginary horizons and cycles of past, present, and future. The resulting virtual space facilitates a meditative practice that dissolves and obliterates the bedrock of the physical surrounding altogether. Pictorial images become oneiric mirror reflections and phantasmatic projections of both Buddhist deities and the perceiving subject. Individual pictorial tableaux derived from disparate Buddhist sutras, rather than ‘illustrating’ the sutras, mark different phases of an implied visualization process and sustain an optical fiction.