The Rise of West Lake by Xiaolin Duan;

Author:Xiaolin Duan;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Washington Press

PART III

The Cultural Trope of Nature

CHAPTER FIVE

PRAY AND PLAY

Pilgrimage and Sightseeing

WEST LAKE AND THE SURROUNDING MOUNTAINS WERE DOTTED with numerous religious sites. The Northern Song literatus Wang Sui (975–1033) noted in his description of the lake that “More than a hundred monasteries are scattered around the lake, echoing each other . . . this is indeed the finest scenery of the Zhe area, the place most worth visiting.”1 As this comment illustrates, the monasteries were regarded as the most notable feature of the lake and one factor that made it an outstanding regional destination. A large proportion of the sites labeled on the gazetteer map of West Lake were related to religion, including seventy Buddhist monasteries, twenty Daoist temples, fourteen shrines, eleven pagodas, and other places whose names suggest connections with religion (figure 5.1).

Noted along with other scenic spots and famous places, these temples were no longer treated merely as places of worship, but as sites of secular interest, worth visiting in their own right. Similarly, Zhou Mi also listed these religious sites together with other natural sites and cultural spots in a chapter in Old Affairs of the Martial Grove titled “Spectacular Scenery of the Lake and Its Mountains.” This emerging phenomenon of incorporating religious sites into sightseeing images and discourses complicated both the nature of sightseeing activities themselves and the functions these sacred sites served.

Pilgrimage expeditions and sightseeing excursions to West Lake were interdependent, so that today it sometimes is difficult to distinguish between the two. Most of the accounts of trips to West Lake recorded during or soon after the event had elements of both. Pilgrims wanted others to know about their sightseeing expeditions; sightseers could rarely resist the temptation of going into a temple to offer incense and pray for good fortune.

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