Ghosts in the Mists: The Visual and the Visualized in Chinese Buddhist Art, ca. 1178

Water-Land Retreat, a late twelfth-century Chinese Buddhist painting crafted for use in large-scale offering rituals, depicts the liminal moment of ghosts' manifestation during a nocturnal liturgy of spectral salvation. Taking inspiration from the sensory dimensions of ritual performance and making use of a sophisticated stratigraphy of pigmentation, the painting leads the viewer-worshipper from consideration of external acts of offering and recitation to contemplation of internal visualizations performed solely in the minds of meditating monks. The viewer-worshipper is thus awakened to the multisensory matrix of ritual that unites liturgical art, text, and performance.