Transcending History: (Re)Building Longchang Monastery of Mount Baohua in the Seventeenth Century

This paper analyzes the roles architectural renovation played in the revival of Longchang Monastery of Mount Baohua (Jiangsu), a major Chinese monastery of the Vinaya School and an ordination center in Late Imperial China. Based on temple gazetteers, monastic memoirs, and modern documentation of monastic architecture and life by Prip-Møller, the author reveals the formation of a spatial system that centered at the threefold ordination rituals. It took the entire seventeenth century for the system to take form under the supervision of a Chan monk-architect Miaofeng and three successive Vinaya abbots, Sanmei, Jianyue, and Ding’an. The spatial practices, comprising a series of reconstructions, reorientations, redesigns, re-demarcations, and refurbishments, have not only reconciled fractures and defects in the monastic architecture but also built a history for the rising institute. This article examines the construction of and the narratives around three centers of the Monastery, namely, the Open-Air Platform Unit where Miaofeng erected a copper hall, the Main Courtyard where Sanmei reoriented the monastic layout to follow the Vinaya tradition, the Ordination Platform Unit where Jianyue rebuilt a stone ordination platform, and again the Open-Air Platform Unit that Ding’an had refurbished and reunited with the later centers. The forces that have driven this seemingly non-progressive history, as the author argues, are not only the consistent efforts to counteract the natural course of material decay, but also the ambition of making a living history without beginning or end.