published_or_final_version / abstract / Buddhist Studies / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

University of Macau / Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities / Department of Communication

Of the thousands of Buddhist manuscripts discovered at Dunhuang, there are many examples of non-official sūtras and dhāraṇī collections more difficult to identify than those with titles identical to canonical sūtras. Manuscript collection catalogs are the first sources consulted when one undertakes research involving manuscripts and in order to be a truly valuable resource, they need to reflect current scholarship. This thesis studies the Dunhuang manuscript, Pelliot chinois 3538, from different perspectives, examining its ritual, iconography, and textual variances. It compares its iconographical program to manuscript sūtras and canonical scriptures, uncovering new information regarding the content of multiple manuscripts. From this research it is apparent that P.3538 is an Avalokiteśvara dhāraṇī ritual that is iconographically informed from a variety of canonical texts: sūtras in the Nīlakaṇṭha/Qianshou cluster, the Mahāpratisarā dhāraṇī sūtra and its corresponding amulet culture, and sūtras connected with the bodhisattva’s narrative history. In examining other manuscripts from Cave 17, we have found that it is a member of a Dunhuang manuscript cluster and is visually represented in an ink on paper altar diagram, Stein no. Ch.00189, from the British Museum. Integrating these findings would enrich descriptive catalogs for future research. / Religion

La roue des existences, image célèbre du bouddhisme himalayen, représente les différents mondes de renaissances, les causes et mécanismes de leurs enchaînements, elle illustre enfin la possibilité d’échapper au cycle samsarique. Les dates, la situation géographique, les emplacements des représentations, comme leur complexité et leur variété, suscitent de nombreuses questions qui nous ont conduit à étudier les textes canoniques anciens qui en posent les bases, à analyser les nombreux concepts représentés, mais aussi et surtout à examiner l’iconographie d’un corpus de soixante-dix-neuf roues réparties sur le territoire de quatre pays : l’Inde, le Népal, le Bhoutan et la Chine. Nos observations, résultat d’un long travail sur l’ensemble des informations et des thèmes contenus dans chaque roue, permettent de constater que la roue de la vie était connue dans un vaste territoire qui dépassait largement le monde himalayen, que sa fonction a évolué pendant une période de plus de quinze siècles, qu’il s’agit d’un thème très ancien toujours d’actualité, dont les variations révèlent le degré d’initiative des peintres et témoignent parfois d’ interprétations doctrinales différentes, reflétant des talents divers et le souci systématique de différencier chaque oeuvre des autres peintures. / One of the most famous images of Himalayan Buddhism is the wheel of existence (bhavacakra); it represents the various worlds of rebirths, the causes and mechanisms of their sequences and finally it illustrates the possibility of escaping the samsaric cycle. The age, the geographic situation, the complexity, the location and the variety of the representations raise many questions which lead to study the old canonical texts on which they are based, to analyze the many concepts represented, but also and especially examin the iconography of a corpus of seventy nine wheels to be found over the territory of the four countries which are today, India, Nepal, Bhutan and China. A long and extensive study of the vast amount of information contained in each wheel, makes it possible to say that the wheel of existence was known in a very large territory which greatly exceeded the Himalayan area, that its function evolved over a period of more than fifteen centuries, that it is a very old topic still relevant today and, that the works and the initiatives of the painters reveal variations which show their degrees of initiatives, sometimes different doctrinal interpretations, but also different talents and the systematic concern to be different from each other.