Sacred Space in Uyghur Buddhism

Abstract

Buddhism became the major cultural driving force among the Uyghurs after it began to spread in earnest around the turn of the first millennium CE.2 It affected all arenas of cultural expression, such as architecture, visual arts, literature, poetry, and so on. Sacred space in Uyghur Buddhism is a topic which has not been researched in a systematic fashion so far, although some important points have been touched upon in previous research.3 When dealing with this issue, several key aspects are to be examined without reference to the complex discussion concerning the concept of ‘the holy’ or ‘the sacred’ in Religious Studies. A highly important issue connected with the topic is certainly pilgrimage, but as Simone-Christiane Raschmann’s article “Pilgrims in Old Uyghur Inscriptions: A Glimpse behind their Records” (see Chapter 8 in this volume) is dealing with it, I refrain from discussing this most significant aspect of sacred space viewed from the angle of religious practice. While art historical and archaeological questions immediately come to mind, I will confine this investigation to a perusal of Old Uyghur texts, due to a lack of sufficient expertise in the aforementioned domains. A thorough investigation of the issue would be best accomplished by a team of specialists from those different fields. A combination of archaeological methods and philological expertise, for instance, has led Takao Moriyasu to discover the ‘Manichaean layer’ beneath a ‘Buddhist