Gathering Regional Practices: Shaping a Buddhist Capital through Peaks and Waters

Scattered Buddhist sites along winding rivers, mirrored lakes, and mist-veiled peaks shaped the sacred contours of Hangzhou under the Wuyue Kingdom in the tenth century. More than a political capital, it became a devotional terrain where centuries of regional Buddhist practices were gathered and re-inscribed into the local landscape.

This presentation traces how Wuyue rulers and communities transformed the city’s natural topography into a living practicescape. Four directional axes emerged—framed by pagodas perched on the southern and northern peaks, and echoed along the Qiantang River and the West Lake. Each axis bore the imprint of ritual traditions drawn from across the kingdom: relic veneration from Mingzhou and Yuezhou, the cult of arhats from Mt. Tiantai, and sacred Indian mountains reimagined on Hangzhou’s ridgelines. Pagodas rose as cosmological markers, caves were carved for meditative retreat and public worship, and monasteries blossomed into scenic landmarks of ritual engagement.

Through visual and spatial analysis, historical mapping, and close readings of inscriptions and gazetteers, this paper explores how Wuyue’s sacred geography was shaped by the strategic layering of practices onto specific sites. In doing so, it reveals how Hangzhou’s mountains and waters became vessels of memory, devotion, and regional identity—offering a model of Buddhist landscape-making that was both locally rooted and cosmologically resonant.