This dissertation explores how Chan Buddhists made the unprecedented claim to a level of religious authority on par with the historical Buddha Śākyamuni and, in the process, invented what it means to be a buddha in China. This claim helped propel the Chan tradition to dominance of elite monastic Buddhism during the Song dynasty (960-1279), licensed an outpouring of Chan literature treated as equivalent to scripture, and changed the way Chinese Buddhists understood their own capacity for religious authority in relation to the historical Buddha and the Indian homeland of Buddhism. But the claim itself was fraught with complication. After all, according to canonical Buddhist scriptures, the Buddha was easily recognizable by the “marks of the great man” that adorned his body, while the same could not be said for Chan masters in the Song. What, then, distinguished Chan masters from everyone else? What authorized their elite status and granted them the authority of buddhas? According to what normative ideals did Chan aspirants pursue liberation, and by what standards did Chan masters evaluate their students to determine who was worthy of admission into an elite Chan lineage? How, in short, could one recognize a buddha in Song-dynasty China? The Chan tradition never answered this question once and for all; instead, the question broadly animated Chan rituals, institutional norms, literary practices, and visual cultures. My dissertation takes a performative approach to the analysis of Chan hagiographies, discourse records, commentarial collections, and visual materials, mobilizing the tradition’s rich archive to measure how Chan interventions in Buddhist tradition changed the landscape of elite Chinese Buddhism and participated in the epochal changes attending China’s Tang-to-Song transition.

In 1126, the Song Dynasty (960-1279) was faced with an exigent political crisis: after testing the borders for years, the neighboring Jin state marched its armies south, destroyed the capital city Bianjing, and reduced its territories by half. The dynasty’s collapse and reconstitution in southern China has prompted ongoing scholarly debate about what types of political, economic, and cultural differences emerged between the Northern and Southern Song periods. My project uses the narrative handscroll Illustrations of Auspicious Responses to study the development of the imperial cult and images of rulership in the Southern Song. It is the first monograph length study of the scroll since it was rediscovered in 2009 and examines how the reigning Zhao house effectively used visual and material culture to argue for its legitimacy, employing the rhetoric of moral justice and acculturation, rather than overt depictions of military dominance, to describe the establishment of the Southern Song and its first ruler. Works such as Illustrations demonstrate that the sophistication of court-based art was not destroyed along with its physical structures. Rather, with the move south artists became essential to promoting the political aims of the court: using cultural legacy as the most expedient way to purchase political legitimacy in a time of uncertainty. Illustrations acts as an expertly articulated defense of the court’s right to rule, echoes of which have filtered through the late imperial period and can be seen in how China positions itself in relation to the world today.