Texts Related to Baodingshan by Professor Kucera

Ritual and Representation in Chinese Buddhism: Visualizing Enlightenment at Baodingshan 12th – 21st Centuries 2016 Cambria Press

Looks at the entire site focusing on all of the works found in Great Buddha Bend, discussing why the works were created and how they have been used over the past nine centuries. Contains extensive amounts of translation of both sacred and secular texts as well as photographs of the site. Click here to listen to an interview with the author.

“Chicken-Feeding Girl.” Object Narrative. In Conversations: An Online Journal of the Center for the Study of Material and Visual Cultures of Religion (2014). http://mavcor.yale.edu/conversations/object-narratives/chicken-feeding-girl

Zhang Shu stele translation – 2008 unpublished manuscript. 

Complete translation of 1818 text carved in 1874 on a stele at Baodingshan which describes the site in the early 1800s.

Select translations of other secular inscriptions at Baodingshan – 2009 unpublished manuscript.

Cliff Notes: Text and Image at Baodingshan 2002 – Doctoral dissertation, University of Kansas [Illustrations available here]

Looks outward towards the narrative series of carved tableaux at Baodingshan’s Great Buddha Bend. Contains complete translations of the Buddhist texts carved within the six narratives as well as descriptions of the interplay between each work’s sculpted figural carvings and the texts.  Includes a discussion of narrative versus iconic works found at Baodingshan and authorship as well as audience for the works in the 12th century.

Lessons in Stone: Baodingshan and its Hell Imagery 1995 – Masters thesis, University of Oregon

Discusses the development of hell within a Chinese consciousness and the placement of hell historically within Sichuan Province. Contains complete translations of the Buddhist texts carved within the hell scenes at Great Buddha Bend, Baodingshan as well as descriptions of the hell tableau carvings. [An abridged copy of this work is published in The Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities  no. 67 [1995]: 81-157.]

Book review, Summit of Treasures,  Artibus Asiae (Spring 2004): 252-255. 

Review of Angela Howard’s work on Baodingshan.

Also consider: UNESCO documents related to Dazu Rock Carvings