Buddhist Architecture in East Asia

This issue focuses on the Buddhist architecture in East Asia. Over the last 2000 years, Buddhism had transformed not only the intellectual and practical lives but also the built environments of East Asia. The articles in this issue aim to capture the scope and diversity of East Asian Buddhist architecture and delineate the front lines of research in the field. In this collection, without bypassing the significant topics of famous temples, influential monasteries, and monumental landmarks, we try to restore a more balanced picture of Buddhist practice and the built environment by incorporating buildings and planning from the overlooked regions and aspects of Buddhism. Studies here feature shrines and temples in small villages as well as those in sacred mountains, forms reshaped by contemporary life as well as those of historical events, and practices in the domestic realm as well as those with pilgrimage significance. We want to go beyond the well-established scholarships on stylistic changes, technical development, and the typological studies of halls and pagodas in China, Japan, and Korea. There are in-depth discussions of examples from regions and cultures of religious hybridity, analyzing the way architecture is built for and shaped by the practices of a given community, integrated into the spiritual and material lives, and share themes and concepts to foster a comprehensive culture that sustains life and identity of a place. These are significant issues not only for the scholarship on architectural history, but also meaningful for the contemporary building of our own life and faith

The Surface Deformation and Earthquake History Associated with the 1975 M 6.8 Bagan Earthquake in Myanmar

The 1975 M 6.8 Bagan earthquake occurred on 8th July 1975, at 12:04:38 (UTC). The epicenter was at 21.50N 94.70E with the depth of 112 km (ISC) and focal mechanism is thrusting (USGS).  The intensity of earthquake was severe which involved destruction of many pagodas with a loss of at least one live and one injury. Most of the pagodas were damaged with their tops falling down to the ground.  Bagan, the land of temples and stupas was shaken by a series of earthquakes since ancient time and the earliest records are about 25 November,1372; 14 July 1485 A.D. and another event in 1550 A.D.by which event Shwe-gu-gyi temple was damaged. Although the 1975 earthquake was one of the significant earthquakes that have occurred along inland zone in the western Myanmar, this event has not been analyzed within the context of present-day understanding of earthquake seismology. The mode of deformation and seismic history of these earthquakes remain unresolved. Due to another large earthquake, Chauk earthquake in 2016 with M 6.8, approximate numbers of pagodas of (400) were damaged as the previous 1975 Bagan earthquake. Pagodas left intact and withstand as before.  Geologists and earthquake engineers went to Bagan city and neighboring towns for damage assessment a few days after the 2016 Chauk earthquake event. People explained that the main shock was very powerful and the houses and religious building were lifted about 3 times at initial shaking and then lateral shaking continued for a minute. It is due to the ground motion that was strong enough to fling up the buildings as the fault rupture beneath it. On the base of field investigation that was carried out to map the surface rupture associated with this earthquake event, the 1975 Bagan earthquake and 2016 Chauk earthquake are intermediate-depth subduction earthquakes and such inland intermediate-depth earthquakes are hazardous earthquakes for the area along the Rakhine Western Ranges (Indo-Andaman belt) under which the India plate is subducting beneath the Burma plate. These earthquakes are the most significant events that occurred in intra-plate subduction zone setting.&nbsp

Cultural evolution in Vietnam’s early 20th century: a Bayesian networks analysis of Franco-Chinese house designs

The study of cultural evolution has taken on an increasingly interdisciplinary and diverse approach in explicating phenomena of cultural transmission and adoptions. Inspired by this computational movement, this study uses Bayesian networks analysis, combining both the frequentist and the Hamiltonian Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) approach, to investigate the highly representative elements in the cultural evolution of a Vietnamese city’s architecture in the early 20th century. With a focus on the façade design of 68 old houses in Hanoi’s Old Quarter (based on 78 data lines extracted from 248 photos), the study argues that it is plausible to look at the aesthetics, architecture, and designs of the house façade to find traces of cultural evolution in Vietnam, which went through more than six decades of French colonization and centuries of sociocultural influence from China. The in-depth technical analysis, though refuting the presumed model on the probabilistic dependency among the variables, yields several results, the most notable of which is the strong influence of Buddhism over the decorations of the house façade. Particularly, in the top 5 networks with the best Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) scores and p\u3c0.05, the variable for decorations (DC) always has a direct probabilistic dependency on the variable B for Buddhism. The paper then checks the robustness of these models using Hamiltonian MCMC method and find the posterior distributions of the models’ coefficients all satisfy the technical requirement. Finally, this study suggests integrating Bayesian statistics in the social sciences in general and for the study of cultural evolution and architectural transformation in particular

Archaeoseismology of the AD 1545 earthquake in Chiang Mai, Northern Thailand

The A.D. 1545 Chiang Mai earthquake in northern Thailand was studied by historical and archaeological sources.The temple Wat Chedi Luang has lost about half of the original 80-metres height due to southward-directed collapse. Twenty-one temple sites – out of 74 visited – has tilted pagodas, up to 5° in various directions, dominated by a SE trend. All damaged temples were built before the 1545 earthquake. We suggest that a city-wide liquefaction event caused tilting. The responsible earthquake possibly occurred along the Doi Suthep Fault within city limits. Possible activity of distant faults is assessed

To Die with the Buddha: The Brick Pagoda and Its Role in the Xuezhuang Tomb in Early Medieval China

The important late fifth- or early sixth-century brick tomb at Xuezhuang in Dengxian (Henan) features a brick form at the rear wall, which remained mysterious until it has recently been shown to represent a Buddhist pagoda. This discovery sheds light on the purpose of the burial chamber, featuring the novel combination of vaulted ceiling, colonnade, and pagoda, as simulating an Indian-derived Buddhist temple (caitya). To reinforce this Buddhist context, the burial chamber simultaneously imitates the structure of a Buddhist votive stele (zaoxiangbei 造像碑), in which various Buddhist images, including the Buddha and bodhisattvas, apsaras, worshippers, and guardians, are carefully organized. The Xuezhuang tomb thus merges Buddhist structures with the traditional Chinese funerary structure, representing an entirely new manner in which funerary art and Buddhist art interacted with one another in early medieval China. While in earlier times Buddhist elements were subject to the unilaterally dominant funerary context, in the fifth to sixth centuries, as the importance of a specifically Buddhist context increased, the tomb occupant, whose coffin lay right before the pagoda, became an integral part of a simulated Buddhist structure as a worshipper symbolically poised to worship the pagoda or attend the “dead” Buddha in the concealed Buddhist “temple” that was the tomb