Purifying Body in Stages as a Ritual Metaphor of Gradual Approach to Enlightenment: Zhiyi’s Conception of Interconnected Bath-Sanctuary Chambers in Fangdeng sanmei xingfa (Vaipulya-samādhi Practices)

In medieval Chinese Buddhism, liturgical texts of repentance practice usually stipulated practitioners to purify themselves to protect ritual sanctuary from defilement, but specific guideline was seldom given. The Fangdeng sanmei xingfa, Zhiyi’s (538 – 597) earliest and lengthiest manual for the Vaipulya repentance practice, however, specifies that the practitioner should pass through three separate but interconnected chambers before entering the inner sanctuary for the ritual performance: the bathhouse, the second chamber for soaking the fragrance of incense smoke, and the first chamber for changing clean robe. This study aims at exploring 1) how this ritual-spatial organization was markedly different from bathing facilities in Chinese and Indian Buddhist monasteries, as well as in Daoist and Confucian fasting ceremonies; 2) the various sources upon which Zhiyi developed his conception, materially and metaphorically, from the earlier form of Vaipulya-dharani Fast practiced by the sixth-century Southern Chinese imperial families. The study also celebrates Zhiyi’s instruction as the first attempt in the human history of architecture to employ separate antechambers to control contamination and achieve higher cleanliness level, which is only seen centuries later when asepsis surgical suite was created in the nineteenth-century American hospitals. Although this careful prescription did not become a living tradition of Chinese monasticism, and even the master himself simplified the process later to meet his re-conception for a “perfect and sudden”, rather than gradual, approach to enlightenment, it provides a rare example revealing how ancient Buddhist rituals and their ordering of space could resonate with issues of the architectural design in the modern world.

  
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