This article argues that lotus and dharma wheel motifs in the Dunhuang Mogao Caves function not merely as decorative symbols but as active visual apparatuses that generate embodied religious experience through a mechanism we term “totemic mediation.” Drawing on Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist reading of totemism, Descola’s ontological framework, Gell’s theory of art as agency, Meyer’s “sensational form,” and Varela’s neurophenomenology, we define totemic mediation as a triadic mechanism encompassing material–spatial arrangement, ontological transformation of experiential states, and value structure generation. We analyze motifs from Mogao Caves 285, 329, and 361 using a five-step analytic framework: formal–visual description, reconstructed embodied viewing, doctrinal identification, mediation mechanism analysis, and evaluative assessment. The analysis demonstrates that the lotus mediates ontologically along a spatial axis, building a vertical channel between the worldly and the divine through ceiling configurations and upward gazes, while the dharma wheel mediates teleologically across the temporal axis, neutralizing linear temporality through rotational dynamics. Together, these motifs constitute “visual prajñā”—a nonconceptual, embodied cognitive effect that bypasses discursive reasoning to enable direct apprehension of śūnyatā (emptiness). This article offers a replicable analytic framework for examining how religious images operate simultaneously as visual apparatuses and ontological mediators.
Yue Wang (Fri,) studied this question.