Sacralizing Mount Lu: Monastic Practice, Textual Construction, and Cultural Memory in Medieval China

Abstract

Mount Lu’s transformation from a natural landscape into a Buddhist sacred space provides an important case for understanding how sacred geography was produced in medieval China. Rather than treating sacredness as an inherent quality of a place or as the product of textual representation alone, this article argues that Mount Lu was sacralized through the historical interaction of monastic practice, textual production, and cultural memory. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s theory of the production of space, the study examines how Huiyuan (334–416) and his community redefined Mount Lu through monastic settlement, ritual activity, institutional formation, and cultural authority centered on Donglin Temple. It further analyzes how historiographical writing, literary representation, and intertextual circulation extended the mountain’s religious significance beyond the monastic community and consolidated it within broader traditions of literati culture. In this process, Mount Lu became not only a Buddhist sacred site but also a durable site of memory onto which Buddhist, Daoist, and Confucian meanings could be projected and renegotiated. By tracing the interaction between embodied religious practice and textual transmission, this article shows that the sacralization of Mount Lu was neither a spontaneous religious phenomenon nor simply the result of state designation, but rather a cumulative historical achievement shaped by monastic initiative, literary circulation, and the long-term work of cultural remembrance.

1. Introduction

Mount Lu (Lushan 廬山) occupies a distinctive place in the history of Chinese Buddhism. Unlike later Buddhist mountains whose prestige was reinforced by imperial patronage, organized pilgrimage, and clearly defined cultic associations, Mount Lu emerged more gradually as a sacred site. Its religious significance took shape through the activities of Huiyuan 慧遠 (334–416) and the monastic community centered on Donglin Temple, as well as through the texts, rituals, and elite networks associated with that community. This article asks how Mount Lu came to be constituted as a Buddhist sacred mountain in medieval China. It argues that Mount Lu’s sanctity was not an intrinsic feature of the site itself, but rather the result of a historical process through which monastic practice, textual representation, and institutional formation progressively redefined the mountain as Buddhist space.

The study of sacred space has long occupied an important place in the history of religions. Rather than treating sacred space primarily as the manifestation of hierophany in Mircea Eliade’s sense (Eliade 1959), this article adopts a sociological approach informed by Henri Lefebvre’s theory of the production of space (Lefebvre 1991). Lefebvre’s well-known triad—spatial practice, representations of space, and representational spaces—offers a useful framework for understanding the making of Mount Lu as a Buddhist landscape. At the level of spatial practice, monastic retreat, White Lotus Society gatherings, and the construction of Donglin Temple inscribed Buddhist life into the mountain’s physical environment. At the level of representations of space, texts such as the Gaoseng zhuan 高僧傳 (Biographies of Eminent Monks) and the Chu sanzang jiji 出三藏記集 (Collection of Records on the Translation of the Tripiṭaka) presented Mount Lu as a site of doctrinal authority, disciplined monasticism, and religious legitimacy. At the level of representational spaces, literati poetry and commemorative writing reimagined the mountain as a landscape of moral and spiritual aspiration. From this perspective, Mount Lu was not simply a location where Buddhism happened to flourish; it was a religious space produced through repeated acts of dwelling, writing, ritual gathering, and cultural memory.

This spatial approach also clarifies a broader issue in the history of Chinese Buddhism: the localization of Buddhism within Chinese cultural traditions. At Mount Lu, Buddhist soteriological concerns were articulated alongside Confucian ethical ideals and Daoist modes of reflection, while the ideal of mountain retreat resonated with long-standing Chinese traditions of reclusion. The formation of Mount Lu as a Buddhist sacred site therefore illustrates not only the geographical spread of Buddhism, but also the ways in which Buddhist communities adapted themselves to preexisting cultural and spatial imaginaries.

Scholarship on Buddhist sacred mountains has illuminated a number of important issues. Studies by Erik Zürcher (Zürcher 2007), Tsukamoto Zenryu (Tsukamoto 1985), Tang Yongtong (Tang 2015), and Cao Hong (Cao 2002) have clarified Huiyuan’s institutional and doctrinal significance, while Stephen Teiser (Teiser 1988) and Robert Sharf (Sharf 2002) have shown how Buddhism was conceptually translated and socially accommodated in Chinese contexts. Koichi Shinohara (Shinohara 1999), James Robson (Robson 2009), and Chen Jinhua (Shi et al. 2017), moreover, have drawn attention to the textual and ritual processes through which Buddhist sacred geography took shape. Yet Mount Lu has often been treated either as a passive setting for Huiyuan’s activities or as a precursor to the better-documented sacred mountains of later periods. This article instead treats Mount Lu as an early medieval case of the historical production of sacred space. I argue that its prestige first emerged through the localized authority of Huiyuan’s monastic community, its institutional presence, and the miracle narratives attached to it, and was later extended and stabilized through literati participation, commemorative writing, and cultural remembrance.

Methodologically, this study combines close readings of primary sources with spatial theory and intellectual history. It examines how Buddhist authority was inscribed into the landscape through embodied practice, monastic institutions, and literary representation. The sacralization of Mount Lu was neither a spontaneous religious phenomenon nor simply the result of state designation. Rather, it was a cumulative historical achievement shaped by monastic initiative, literati engagement, and sustained textual production. The case of Mount Lu thus shows that Buddhist sacred geography in early medieval China could emerge through the interaction of practice, discourse, and memory, even in the absence of the forms of imperial sponsorship that later characterized other famous sacred mountains. The sections that follow examine, first, the institutional and ritual activities associated with Huiyuan’s community; second, the textual and historiographical representations that established Mount Lu’s religious authority; third, the literary writings that extended this sacrality beyond the monastic community; and finally, the mnemonic and cultural processes through which Mount Lu became a durable site of memory.

2. From Geographic Landscape to Sacred Space

Before examining how Mount Lu was produced as a Buddhist sacred space, it is important to note that the mountain was not an empty site awaiting religious inscription. Prior to its association with Huiyuan’s community, Mount Lu already occupied a place in geographical writing, historical memory, and traditions of reclusion. Yet such cultural prestige did not in itself amount to Buddhist sacrality. What Buddhism contributed was a new spatial, institutional, and textual configuration through which the mountain became legible in specifically Buddhist terms. Through monastic residence, ritual practice, the establishment of Donglin Temple, and narratives associated with Huiyuan, Mount Lu was reorganized as a site of Buddhist significance and made historically durable through textual transmission and cultural memory.

2.1. Mapping Mount Lu as a Cultural Landscape

One of the earliest well-known textual references to Mount Lu appears in Sima Qian’s Shiji 史記 (Records of the Grand Historian). In describing his travels, Sima Qian wrote: “I traveled south and ascended Mount Lu, where I viewed the Nine Rivers as regulated by Yu (余南登廬山,觀禹疏九江)”1 (Sima 1982, p. 1415). As Mark Edward Lewis (Lewis 2006, p. 249) points out, this way of viewing natural landscapes—interpreting them through the lens of ancient hydraulic control and territorial surveying—was a defining characteristic of early imperial Chinese geography. In this context, Mount Lu entered the textual record not as a Buddhist site but as a legible feature within the political and cultural order of the empire.

By the Wei-Jin and Northern and Southern Dynasties, official histories located Mount Lu more precisely within the administrative geography of the empire. The Jinshu 晉書 (Book of Jin) records: “In the first year of the Yongxing era (304 CE), Xunyang Commandery was established by partitioning Xunyang and Chaisang counties, placing them under the jurisdiction of Jiangzhou (永興元年，分廬江之潯陽、武昌之柴桑二縣置尋陽郡，屬江州)” (Fang 1974, p. 463). Such records did not sacralize the mountain, but they did render it administratively legible and embed it within the spatial order of the state.

Later official histories from the Sui and Tang (581–907) periods further consolidated Mount Lu’s status as a major regional landmark. As noted in the Suishu 隋書 (Book of Sui): “Pencheng, formerly known as Chaisang, was established as Xunyang Commandery in the early years of the Daye era (605–617 CE) … The region contains Lake Chaohu, Lake Pengli, Mount Lu, and Mount Wangfu (湓城舊曰柴桑，置尋陽郡……有巢湖, 彭蠡湖，有廬山，望夫山)” (Wei and Defen 1973, p. 865). This practice of grouping Mount Lu with major natural features like Lake Pengli illustrates its growing significance in the imperial geography of the south, which served as a central component in transforming a physical location into a culturally “inscribed landscape” (Strassberg 1994, p. 6).

If official histories positioned Mount Lu within the secular geography of the empire, Huiyuan helped reinterpret it within a religious framework. Huiyuan transformed the mountain’s identity by combining local legends with spiritual beliefs. His efforts vividly illustrate the early Sinicization of Buddhism—a dynamic in which, as Robert Sharf observes, “The Chinese looked to Buddhism for answers to questions that they found apposite—they approached Chinese translations of Buddhist texts not as glosses on the Indic originals, but as valuable resources that addressed their own immediate conceptual, social, and existential concerns” (Sharf 2002, p. 12). One important step in this process was Huiyuan’s recovery and reinterpretation of the mountain’s legendary past, especially the story of Kuanglu 匡廬, which linked the mountain to the recluse Kuang Su 匡俗 (or Kuang Xu 匡續), a recluse who cultivated Daoist techniques and attained transcendence during the Zhou dynasty. As Huiyuan writes in Lushan Ji: “During the Yin–Zhou period, there was a man named Master Kuangxu, who lived in seclusion on this mountain and later became an immortal and departed, leaving only his hut behind. People therefore named the mountain after him (殷周際有匡續先生者，隱居此山仙去，唯廬存，人因以命其山) (Wang 2006, p. 105).” By associating Mount Lu with an indigenous tradition of reclusion and spiritual withdrawal, Huiyuan situated the mountain within a genealogy that long predated the arrival of Buddhism. This move was crucial to the localization of Buddhism: rather than displacing earlier meanings, Buddhist discourse reconfigured an already meaningful landscape within a new religious horizon. This narrative of withdrawal recalls what Alan Berkowitz describes as the medieval Chinese ideal of “reclusion actualized into a way of life” (Berkowitz 2000, p. 128). In this sense, local religious culture had already marked the mountain as numinous before it became a Buddhist center, providing a cultural foundation on which Buddhist sanctity could later be built.

Huiyuan also endowed Mount Lu’s rugged terrain with specifically religious meaning. Writing from the standpoint of monastic cultivation, he emphasized the mountain’s steep cliffs, deep ravines, and physical remoteness, describing it as a landscape of “lofty crags and narrow cliffs, sheer precipices thousands of fathoms deep” (Lu 1983, p. 1085). Such topographical isolation resonated strongly with the Buddhist ideal of the araṇya, the forest retreat associated with withdrawal from worldly life. As Reginald Ray characterizes it, the araṇya operates as a liminal zone that “excludes those who would follow the ancient Buddhist ideal of unrestricted wandering” (Ray 1999, p. 162). In medieval China, however, this ideal could not simply be transplanted unchanged. As Stephen Teiser (Teiser 1988) has shown, the successful establishment of Buddhism depended on adapting inherited Indian models to local social realities. For Huiyuan, the ruggedness of Mount Lu offered more than just spiritual solitude; it provided a vital neutral space that safeguarded the Buddhist community’s independence amidst the political turbulence of the Southern Dynasties (Zürcher 2007, p. 199). At Mount Lu, topographical isolation provided not only spiritual seclusion but also a degree of protection for a monastic community seeking stability amid political fragmentation. The mountain thus became a deliberately fashioned monastic landscape in which ascetic aspiration and institutional survival converged.

These spatial ideals were further articulated in early writings on Mount Lu that linked the mountain’s physical environment to the needs of Buddhist cultivation. By weaving together topographical description, local legend, and monastic justification, such texts did not simply record the mountain; they helped produce it as Buddhist space. In the Lushan Lüeji 廬山略記 (Brief Records of Mount Lu), Huiyuan connected the mountain’s physical features to the practical and spiritual needs of early Chinese Buddhism. As one of the earliest monographic accounts of Mount Lu written by a religious figure, the text justifies the establishment of Donglin Temple by presenting the mountain’s rugged and secluded terrain as especially suited to cultivation. Huiyuan achieved this by weaving together local legend and topographical description, thereby grounding his Buddhist community in a space that was at once culturally intelligible and physically set apart. This rhetorical fusion of myth and landscape resembles what Robert Campany (Campany 2009) has described in studies of the textual construction of religious memory, in which places are reimagined through writing and preserved as sites of transcendence.

Just as Huiyuan played the decisive role in constructing Mount Lu’s early Buddhist sanctity, later writers extended this process by integrating geographical description with human history. During the Northern Wei (386–534), Li Daoyuan’s Shui Jing Zhu 水經注 (The Guide to Waterways with Commentary) provided a systematic account of Mount Lu’s geology and hydrology, marking a breakthrough in ancient Chinese geographical literature. Referencing the Shan Hai Jing 山海經 (Classic of Mountains and Seas), he noted earlier names for the mountain, like “Santianzidu” and “Tianzizhang,” while explicitly linking the name “Mount Lu” to the legend of the Kuang brothers’ hermitages. Based on meticulous field observations, the chapter “Water of Lujiang” details the topography of Stone Gate Gorge and Incense Burner Peak, including the perilous “three stone beams extending several tens of paces but barely a foot across” (三石梁長數十丈, 廣不盈尺). Li also scientifically documented the hydrological connections between Mount Lu and Poyang Lake. As Richard Strassberg (Strassberg 1994, pp. 77–78) argues, Li Daoyuan’s work marks a pivotal shift in geographical writing, transforming the author’s role from a compiler of mythic traditions into an objective eyewitness of the physical world. Moving beyond myth-centered accounts, Li’s objective recording established what Joseph Needham (Needham 1959, p. 514) calls the proto-scientific foundation for Chinese physical geography. At the same time, Li Daoyuan’s account did more than describe the natural environment. It also registered Mount Lu as a lived religious space. By recording Huiyuan’s activities at Donglin Temple—including the construction of ritual sites and the installation of sacred images—Li linked landscape to devotional practice and showed how natural setting and human action together produced religious meaning. In doing so, he helped consolidate a mode of writing in which geography, memory, and religious life became inseparable. Mount Lu was no longer merely a named mountain in official records; it had become a site whose natural form, historical associations, and Buddhist presence could be read together.

Taken together, these early texts were not neutral records of place. Through administrative documentation, local legend, and topographical description, they transformed Mount Lu from a mountain in the Jiangnan region into a culturally charged landscape. This textual groundwork did not yet fully constitute Mount Lu as a Buddhist sacred mountain, but it made possible the later religious redefinition of the site by providing a landscape already saturated with memory, prestige, and symbolic value.

2.2. Monastic Practice and Sacred Narrative

Granted that early geographical writings made Mount Lu legible as a cultural landscape, Buddhist historiography recast that visibility in explicitly sacred terms. In The Eminent Monk: Buddhist Ideals in Medieval Chinese Hagiography, Kieschnick (1997) writes that “biographies are of great value for reconstructing the geographic spread of monasticism in China, the relative strength of various doctrinal trends over time, and the monastic economy” (p. 2). Within this broader process of cultural construction, historical writing in Chinese Buddhism positioned Mount Lu not merely as a notable mountain, but as a privileged site of religious authority. As Erik Zürcher argued, the mountain’s emergence as an intellectual and spiritual nexus was fundamental to the rise of “gentry Buddhism” during the Southern Dynasties (Zürcher 2007). In the case of Mount Lu, works such as Sengyou’s Chu sanzang jiji and Huijiao’s Gaoseng zhuan did not simply preserve local traditions. They organized miracle accounts, monastic lineage, and spatial memory into a coherent sacred narrative. What Cao Hong describes as the interplay of ganying 感應 (sympathetic resonance), spatial sacralization, and the legitimation of Buddhist lineages is especially visible here (Cao 2002).

A crucial feature of this narrative construction is the portrayal of nature as responsive to monastic charisma. In the Gaoseng zhuan, Huiyuan appears not simply as an eminent cleric but as a figure whose virtue reshapes the mountain environment itself. This is most vividly illustrated in the story of the spring that emerged when Donglin Temple was first established. Finding the site dry, Huiyuan is said to have struck the ground with his staff and declared: “If this land is fit for habitation, let a spring gush forth from this dry ravine.” The text continues: “No sooner were the words uttered than a surge of crystal-clear water erupted, its depths immeasurable” (遠乃以杖扣地曰：若此中可得棲立,當使朽壤抽泉.言畢,清流湧出,後卒成溪) (Shi 1992, p. 220).

The motif of “striking the earth to summon a spring” carries more than narrative drama. It suggests that the mountain’s abundance becomes accessible through the presence of the Dharma and the virtue of the monk who embodies it. In this sense, the story contributes to a broader reimagining of Mount Lu as a spiritually privileged environment, one that could support both monastic discipline and Pure Land aspiration. By overlaying a harsh terrain with providential abundance, such narratives helped authorize Donglin Temple and the White Lotus community as institutions rooted in a landscape marked by divine approval. As Sun Changwu observes, such miracle accounts effectively recast Mount Lu as a localized Pure Land, a transformation grounded in Huiyuan’s religious authority (Sun 2010). By overlaying a harsh and remote terrain with the imagery of providential abundance, these narratives helped authorize the White Lotus Society and the Donglin community as institutions rooted in a divinely favored landscape.

A similar logic appears in later accounts of temple construction, where meteorological wonders are made to support the physical expansion of sacred space. The Donglin shiba gaoxian zhuan 東林十八高賢傳 (Biographies of the Eighteen Eminent Worthies of Donglin), for example, recounts that when timber was needed to enlarge the monastery, a violent thunderstorm broke out during the night, and by morning the river had carried down an ample supply of fine wood. The text interprets this event as evidence that local mountain deities actively aided Huiyuan’s undertaking. In this hagiographical framework, Mount Lu is no longer a passive setting for religious life; it becomes an animate environment that protects and enables the Buddhist community. As Koichi Shinohara (Shinohara 1999, pp. 938–64) argues, these stories of “miraculous construction” functioned as a powerful ideological tool. These narratives framed the establishment of a monastery not as an unwelcome human intrusion, but as a sacred project sanctioned and facilitated by local deities.

Yet Mount Lu’s sacralization depended not only on the transformation of terrain and architecture, but also on the presence of sacred objects that connected the site to a wider Buddhist world. A crucial moment in this regard was the arrival of the Aśoka statue, an episode recorded in both the Chu sanzang jiji and the Gaoseng zhuan. According to Huiyuan’s biography, “when Tao Kan was stationed in Guangzhou, a fisherman saw a miraculous light shining from the sea. The light grew brighter night after night, and when Tao Kan investigated, he discovered that it came from an image of King Aśoka, which he then retrieved and sent to Hanxi Monastery in Wuchang” (昔潯陽陶侃經鎮廣州，有漁人於海中見神光，每夕豔發，經旬彌盛.怪以白侃，侃往詳視，乃是阿育王像，即接歸，以送武昌寒溪寺) (Shi 1992, p. 213).

The narrative goes on to stress the statue’s extraordinary weight—said to exceed ten thousand jin—which made it impossible to move by ordinary means. Yet when Huiyuan sent disciples to invite it to Mount Lu, the image reportedly became light enough to board the boat with ease. The contrast between immovable heaviness and miraculous mobility follows a familiar hagiographical pattern: material resistance yields to sincere devotion. More importantly, the enshrinement of an Aśoka image established a tangible link between Mount Lu and the sacred geography of Indian Buddhism. By acquiring an object associated with Aśokan kingship and the Buddhist past, Mount Lu could be represented not simply as a local monastery, but as a site connected to the transregional history of the Dharma. In the terms used by Zürcher (2007), such narratives contributed to the “domestication” of Buddhism by relocating sacred authority from India into a Chinese landscape.

Buddhist historiography also constructed Mount Lu as a temporal and political refuge. In an age marked by military conflict, regional fragmentation, and the usurpation of power by figures such as Huan Xuan, Sengyou’s Chu sanzang jiji (Sengyou 1995) presents the mountain as a remarkably stable place of withdrawal. By emphasizing Huiyuan’s long residence there—thirty years on the mountain without entering the secular world—the text fashions Mount Lu as a space set apart from political upheaval. As Zürcher notes, this ideal of mountain seclusion allowed the monastic community to preserve a degree of neutrality that was political as well as spiritual (Zürcher 2007, p. 256). In this respect, tranquility itself became one of the mountain’s miracles: Mount Lu was imagined as a place where Buddhist practice could continue despite the instability of the age.

This image of protected seclusion also made Mount Lu an appropriate setting for intellectual and translational work. The Chu sanzang jiji records the activities of eminent foreign monks there, including Saṃghadeva and Buddhabhadra. Its lofty and secluded environment was understood as especially conducive to concentration, scriptural study, and the communication of Buddhist teaching. In this way, the mountain’s natural setting and its scholarly reputation reinforced one another. As Tang Yongtong observes, the “geographical mysticism” of Mount Lu helped create the atmosphere of transcendence associated with the translation of difficult dhyāna and abhidharma materials (Tang 2015, p. 282).

If translation activities established Mount Lu as a place of doctrinal seriousness, the White Lotus Society made its Pure Land associations visible in ritual and spatial form. According to the Gaoseng zhuan, Huiyuan had a lotus pond dug in front of the hall and planted white lotuses there with water drawn from Mount Lu (Shi 1992). This was more than a decorative feature. It materialized the relationship between the present world and Sukhāvatī, allowing the mountain landscape to function as a visible analog of the Western Pure Land. In Cao Hong’s formulation, such acts may be understood as a “ritualization of the landscape,” in which the pond served as a mnemonic and devotional device for visualizing rebirth in the Pure Land (Cao 2002, p. 156). Through this symbolic intervention, Mount Lu became not only a place of monastic cultivation but also a site that could be inhabited imaginatively as Pure Land space.

The sanctification of Mount Lu reached its fullest expression in narratives of death and rebirth. The Gaoseng zhuan records numerous auspicious deathbed signs among members of the White Lotus Society: unusual fragrances filling the room, golden light appearing before the dying, and celestial music sounding in the air. Significantly, these events are located in the humble dwellings of Mount Lu itself. In such accounts, the mountain becomes a place where the boundary between this world and the next is unusually permeable. Practice on Mount Lu is thus represented not merely as meritorious, but as directly efficacious for rebirth in the Western Paradise. As James Robson notes in Power of Place: The Religious Landscape of the Southern Sacred Peak (Nanyue) in Medieval China, these localized miracles “became part of the sacred landscape and were made accessible through traces and through the biographies” (Robson 2009, p. 136). In this sense, Buddhist historiography mapped a universal soteriology onto a specific Chinese mountain.

The miracle narratives preserved in the Chu sanzang jiji and the Gaoseng zhuan served several interrelated functions. First, they localized Buddhism by showing that Mount Lu was inhabited not only by monks but also by responsive spirits, deities, and signs of divine approval. Buddhism was thus presented as capable of taking root within an already animated Chinese landscape. Second, these narratives strengthened claims of lineage and legitimacy. The arrival of the Aśoka statue, for example, provided Mount Lu with a material connection to the Buddhist past and helped compensate for its geographical distance from India. Third, they rendered religious experience visible and concrete. Springs, timber, statues, lotus ponds, fragrances, and light all gave doctrinal claims a sensory form, making the sanctity of Mount Lu imaginable and persuasive to a wider community of believers.

Within the discourse of these texts, Mount Lu was no longer merely a mountain recorded in geographical history. It had become a Buddhist place constituted through miracle, memory, and religious writing. This transformation also helps explain why Mount Lu acquired enduring institutional and intellectual significance in southern Chinese Buddhism. At the same time, the remaking of the mountain was never purely devotional: because sacred space conferred symbolic authority, its production also had broader social and political implications.

2.3. Recasting Mount Lu as a Socio-Political Symbol

Once Mount Lu had been constituted as a sacred Buddhist landscape, it also acquired broader socio-political meanings. It became a site at which religious authority, elite culture, and dynastic order could be negotiated together. Its transformation therefore extended beyond the sphere of miracle and devotion. More fundamentally, it shows how landscape, religious discourse, and cultural identity interacted in the localization of Buddhism in early medieval China. Seen in comparative perspective, Mount Lu differs in important ways from later Buddhist sacred mountains such as Mount Wutai and Nanyue. Whereas those mountains came to be defined more clearly through imperially reinforced cultic identities, more mature devotional systems, and wider pilgrimage formations, Mount Lu represents an earlier and somewhat different model of sacralization. Its authority was established less through formal imperial cultic consolidation than through the interaction of Huiyuan’s monastic community, literati exchange, doctrinal translation, and textual representation. In this respect, Mount Lu was produced as sacred space through negotiated autonomy and cultural mediation, rather than through the more fully institutionalized patterns characteristic of later sacred mountains.

The formation of Mount Lu as a Buddhist center must be situated within the broader accommodation of Buddhism to Confucian and Daoist traditions in medieval China. Yet this process was not simply abstract or doctrinal. Over time, this process contributed to what later came to be described as the “sanjiao heyi” (三教合一, unity of the three teachings), an influential framework in the religious thought of the Eastern Jin and the Tang–Song periods. In order to take root in the Chinese world, Buddhist thinkers translated Indian doctrines into terms intelligible within established intellectual traditions. Ideas such as karmic retribution could be explained in ways that resonated with Confucian concerns for moral responsibility, loyalty, and filial piety, while Buddhist discussions of mind and nature often intersected with Daoist reflections on ziran and the relation between being and non-being. As Feng Youlan observes, the period from the Wei-Jin through the Sui–Tang was especially important for this process of integration (Feng 2011). In his account, Confucianism governs the social world, Daoism nourishes life, and Buddhism cultivates the mind; together they converge on the human realm while balancing transcendence and worldly engagement. Huiyuan played a major role in this development. As Tsukamoto Zenryu emphasizes, Huiyuan’s efforts were foundational in forging the distinct cultural entity of Chinese Buddhism (Tsukamoto 1985). By establishing his community at Donglin Temple and cultivating sustained exchanges with members of the literati, Huiyuan turned Mount Lu into a space where the boundary between monastic and lay worlds could be renegotiated intellectually without being erased institutionally.

Yet during the Eastern Jin, the institutional status of Buddhism remained uncertain. The saṅgha was neither fully incorporated into the state bureaucracy nor entirely independent of the secular order. Instead, it occupied an ambiguous position marked by mutual dependence and recurring tension. As Erik Zürcher notes, this era was characterized by southern gentry Buddhism, where monks had to navigate the complex social codes of the literati to secure their standing (Zürcher 2007, p. 110). Huiyuan used the prestige of Mount Lu to negotiate precisely such a position. His community stood within the social world of Eastern Jin elites, yet also claimed to belong to a sphere that transcended ordinary political obligation. Kenneth Ch’en captures this dynamic perfectly, noting that while Huiyuan’s “footprints never reentered the secular world, the secular world made its way to him” (Ch’en 1973, p. 110). In this way, Huiyuan was able to support social and political stability through moral authority rather than through direct submission to imperial power. The sanctification of Mount Lu must therefore be read not only as a religious development, but also as part of a larger strategy for securing institutional autonomy under unstable political conditions (

Table 1. Huiyuan’s Interpersonal Networks.

Identity	Representative Figures	Cultural Significance
Monk	Huichi, Daosheng, Huiguan, etc.	Established a scholarly community within the Mount Lu monastic order, laying the foundation for Mount Lu’s status as a major Buddhist center.
Translator	Sanghavarman, Dharmaraksa, Kumārajīva, etc.	Promoted the southward transmission of Abhidharma and Vinaya teachings and facilitated cross-cultural Buddhist exchanges.
Confucian literati	Liu Chengzhi, Zhou Xuzhi, Zong Bing, Lei Cizong, Wang Mi, He Zhennan, etc.	Integrated Buddhism with Xuanxue, harmonized Confucian and Buddhist philosophies, and drove the Sinicization of Buddhism among the educated elite.
Aristocrats	Emperor An of Jin, Huan Yi, descendants of Tao Kan, etc.	Provided official endorsement and stable patronage, thereby elevating the social status of Buddhism.
Hermits/Recluses	Hui Yong, Daoists of Mount Lu, etc.	Shaped the tradition of “mountain-forest Buddhism” and established a communal model for reclusive spiritual cultivation.

).

Huiyuan settled at Mount Lu in 381, drawn, according to the Gaoseng zhuan, by its “pure tranquility” and its suitability for calming the mind. With the support of the prefect Huan Yi, Donglin Temple was completed in 383 and soon became the center of a large and influential community. Huiyuan’s historical importance, however, lay not only in founding a monastery but also in the network he gathered around it. Buddhist monks, Confucian scholars, and men of literary and philosophical cultivation all found a place within the world of Mount Lu. Through these exchanges, Huiyuan helped create one of the earliest and most influential settings in which Buddhist teaching could be discussed in sustained dialog with indigenous intellectual traditions. From his mountain retreat, he did not simply administer a temple; he presided over a community in which imported Buddhist ideas were reformulated within the conceptual vocabulary of medieval Chinese elite culture.

To manage the tensions created by this encounter, Huiyuan developed what later scholars often describe as an “inner Buddhist, outer Confucian” position. This formulation offered a practical response to the conflict between monastic discipline and the expectations of the Chinese political order. In Shamen bujing wangzhe lun 沙門不敬王者論 (On Monks Not Bowing to Kings), Huiyuan distinguishes sharply between lay believers and ordained monks. Lay Buddhists, he argues, remain within the social order and should therefore observe Confucian norms such as loyalty and filiality. Monks, by contrast, are “guests beyond the secular realm” and are not bound by the same ritual obligations, including the requirement to bow before the ruler. This argument responded directly to Huan Xuan’s attempt to bring the clergy more fully under state control. By separating “inner teaching” from “outer rites,” Huiyuan maintained that the monastic pursuit of liberation ultimately benefited the state, even while remaining institutionally distinct from it. This was not simple defiance; it was a carefully drawn claim about jurisdiction, one that sought to protect the autonomy of the saṅgha without openly denying royal legitimacy. As Jacques Gernet notes, the fact that “Monasteries, chapels, and hermitages availed themselves of such forces of social cohesion and political agitation is an important fact that needs to be taken into account in a general interpretation of the Buddhist movement in China” (Gernet 1995, p. 296). That these religious communities utilized forces of social cohesion and political agitation is crucial to understanding the Buddhist movement in China.

While this distinction between inner and outer spheres protected the monastery institutionally, Huiyuan’s reflections on dharma-nature and the immortality of the spirit helped make Buddhism intellectually persuasive to the educated elite. In these writings, he drew on familiar Daoist language—especially notions of naturalness and the relation between being and non-being—to articulate Buddhist ideas in terms recognizable to his interlocutors. The point was not that Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism were identical, but that they could be brought into meaningful philosophical conversation. Huiyuan’s achievement lay in translating unfamiliar concepts through a vocabulary already authoritative in Chinese intellectual life. This strategy did more than make Buddhism easier to understand. It invited elite readers to treat Buddhism not as an alien cult, but as a serious system of thought capable of standing alongside the major traditions of the Chinese past.

A third dimension of Huiyuan’s project was spatial. By reimagining Mount Lu through miracle narratives, sacred objects, and the rhetoric of withdrawal, he and his community transformed a noted mountain into a protected Buddhist enclave. This was not merely symbolic. The sacralization of the mountain helped secure a space in which the saṅgha could claim both moral prestige and a degree of practical insulation from court politics. In this sense, the production of sacred space was also a strategy of institutional positioning. As Erik Zürcher suggests, this redefinition effectively carved out a “refuge” for the saṅgha, buffering the monastic community against the volatile power struggles of the imperial court (Zürcher 2007, p. 199). This process epitomizes what Robert Sharf calls domestication—“the intentional adaptation and domestication of Buddhism by Chinese apologists” (Sharf 2002, p. 98).

This spatial transformation was reinforced through literary representation. In works such as You Shimen shi 遊石門 (Poems on Visiting Shimen), Huiyuan and his circle did not merely describe scenery; they rendered the mountain legible as a space of contemplation. Landscape became a medium through which Buddhist metaphysics could be expressed in the refined literary idioms of poetry and fu. The importance of this move was not only esthetic. By writing Mount Lu into the high culture of the Southern Dynasties, Huiyuan’s community made Buddhist space intelligible and attractive to the educated elite. In doing so, they helped establish Mount Lu as one of the most enduring cultural landmarks in the history of Chinese Buddhism.

Through these combined efforts, Mount Lu became far more than a physical site. It emerged as a symbol of both religious distinction and negotiated autonomy. Through institutional boundary-making, philosophical translation, and literary sacralization, Huiyuan secured for his community a form of sacred autonomy. As Cao Hong argues, this was a project deeply rooted in political consciousness (Cao 2002, p. 62). Before the imperial state could fully subsume the Buddhist order, Huiyuan’s Mount Lu provided a distinct model of existence: a spiritual enclave with clear boundaries and the right to self-interpretation, perfectly poised between the reach of the throne and total withdrawal from the secular world.

3. Extending Sacred Space Through Literati Writing

While the previous section examined how Mount Lu was constituted as a Buddhist sacred site through monastic settlement, miracle narratives, and historiographical representation, this section asks how that sacrality moved beyond the monastery into the broader world of elite literary culture. Once associated with Huiyuan, Donglin Temple, and the White Lotus Society, Mount Lu became available for new forms of textual reuse. Through poetic exchange, commemorative writing, and repeated allusion to earlier sites and figures, literati authors did not simply describe a sacred mountain already in place; they helped disseminate, aestheticize, and stabilize its Buddhist associations within a wider cultural memory. Literati writing, in other words, was not external to the sacralization of Mount Lu, but one of the mechanisms by which that sacrality became socially and historically durable.

3.1. Constructing a Spiritual Landscape

This “sacred autonomy” was not sustained through silent isolation, but rather through a vibrant literary tradition that bridged the gap between monastic seclusion and secular literati participation. Mount Lu stands as a preeminent sacred peak in Chinese cultural history, carrying a significance that transcends its physical geography. Over centuries, it has served as a “textualized space”—a site continually inscribed, reshaped, and imbued with meaning by generations of scholars. Prior to the Eastern Jin dynasty, records and legends primarily depicted Mount Lu as an enigmatic dwelling for immortals. However, its systematic construction as a cultural space began in earnest with the monk Huiyuan and his community. Their central project was the transformation of concrete natural vistas into a “spiritual landscape” capable of manifesting Buddhist ideals. By analyzing the writings of Huiyuan’s circle and tracing their influence on subsequent scholars, we can observe Mount Lu’s evolution from a geographical entity into a complex cultural symbol—one that seamlessly integrates religious experience, philosophical reflection, historical memory, and personal emotion.

First, the poetry of the Huiyuan community achieved the “spiritualization” of Mount Lu’s topography. As Simon Schama states in Landscape and Memory, “Landscape is not an isolated or individual phenomenon, but a continuous panorama” (Schama 1995). For Huiyuan and his contemporaries, traversing Mount Lu was not merely passive observation, but an act of active projection. They perceived the “sacred cliffs” and “secluded valleys” as abodes of “divine miracles,” aligning the physical ascent with a spiritual journey of transcending the mundane to seek enlightenment. In their writings, the expansive “many peaks” and the soaring “single peak” ceased to be mere geographical features; they became metaphors for the practitioner’s distinct “mysterious goodness” and “unity with the profound.” Thus, natural “divine beauty” was elevated to a “spiritual resonance” (shenqu神趣) that enlightens the soul, infusing physical landscapes with Buddhist philosophical significance. Furthermore, their literary activities served as rituals that anchored “geographical landscapes” as “cultural landscapes.” Through organized excursions and poetic gatherings, the Huiyuan monastic community transformed specific locations from generic natural features into “memorial landscapes” steeped in shared memory. These sites, marked by their footsteps and verses, became sacred destinations for later generations of literati to visit and venerate. Japanese scholar Nakamura Yoshio describes this as poets completing a “landscape pilgrimage” through words (Nakamura 2014, p. 78). Driven by scholarly writings, new landscapes of Mount Lu emerged in texts, such as Dalin Peak, Lichuan Stream, Donglin Temple, Shimenjian Gorge, Incense Burner Peak, Falling Star Pier, Waterfalls, Stone Mirrors, Xunyang City, Penghu City, Jianji Pavilion, and others. The emergence of these landscapes expanded the thematic content of poetry about Mount Lu, and poets’ ways of understanding Mount Lu’s scenery became increasingly comprehensive. In their poetic creations, they presented interactive scenes where “geographical landscape” and “spiritual landscape” intertwined.

Before the Eastern Jin, Mount Lu had appeared primarily in historical records and marvel tales (zhiguai 志怪), genres that emphasized its remoteness and numinous character. Huiyuan’s writings drew on these earlier associations but redirected them toward Buddhist ends. This mode of seeing was developed further in the group of poems composed in response to Huiyuan’s You Lushan 遊廬山 (Roaming Mount Lu) under the collective title Fenghe Huiyuan You Lushan 奉和慧遠遊廬山 (Composing in Response to Huiyuan’s Roaming Mount Lu). These texts constitute an early collective effort to read Mount Lu through a shared religious sensibility. In his You Lushan 遊廬山 (Roaming Mount Lu), Huiyuan writes: “Lofty crags exhale a pure essence; deep peaks harbor divine traces” (崇巖吐清氣,幽岫棲神跡) (Lu 1983, p. 1085). The mountain here is no longer only a site of strange marvels or immortal traces. It becomes a landscape whose visible forms disclose a deeper spiritual significance. In Fenghe Huiyuan You Lushan, these poems offer some of the earliest sustained attempts to interpret Mount Lu through a shared Buddhist sensibility. Liu Yimin writes, “Who can reach that realm beyond the drifting mists? Remaining in luminous clarity, I am detached from the world of things” (孰至消煙外,曉然與物分) (Lu 1983, p. 937). Wang Qiaozhi describes the mountain in similarly elevated terms: “While countless hills lie low across the vast expanse, a single peak towers alone, soaring into the void” (眾阜平寥廓,壹岫獨淩空) (Lu 1983, p. 938). Zhang Ye adds: “Having crossed manifold horizons to reach this place, in one single leap I have cast off the taints of the mortal world” (朅來越重垠,一舉拔塵染) (Lu 1983, p. 938). Across these poems, topography is consistently linked to transcendence: vastness suggests release, verticality suggests spiritual ascent, and remoteness suggests separation from ordinary life.

As Xiaofei Tian has argued, such poetry does not simply record external scenery but projects onto it what might be called a “mental image” in which mountains and waters serve as figures for inward states (Tian 2005, p. 67). This is especially clear in the way Huiyuan and his companions use the landscape to express the aims of Buddhist practice. Huiyuan writes, “The profound truth is inherently one, and inner joy is equally free” (妙同趣自均,一悟超三益) (Lu 1983, p. 1085), while Liu Yimin describes a movement of self-reflection and inward clarification: “Through self-reflection and the nurturing influence of the world’s spiritual essence, one reaches a state of inner clarity and transcendence” (弱明反歸鑒,暴懷傅靈薰) (Lu 1983, p. 937). Wang Qiaozhi similarly imagines spiritual roaming as a form of union with a higher order: “Only by roaming transcendently in spirit can one attain such rare communion of mind; the realm of sublime perfection is inherently one with the ultimate Dao” (超遊罕神遇,妙善自玄同) (Lu 1983, p. 938).

Just as important, these poems mark a shift away from earlier traditions of immortality-seeking. Huiyuan writes, “Immortals, like all things, undergo transformation; better to merge both into the silent void” (神仙同物化,未若兩俱冥) (Lu 1983, p. 1085). The mountain is therefore not merely inherited from Daoist traditions of transcendence; it is reinterpreted through Buddhist understandings of impermanence and liberation. In this sense, literary writing extends the work already accomplished by Buddhist historiography: it does not simply repeat the mountain’s sanctity, but gives that sanctity new phenomenological and philosophical depth.

These writings also had a commemorative function. Through excursions, poetic exchange, and the naming of specific sites, Huiyuan’s circle began to stabilize Mount Lu as a legible sacred landscape. Peaks, streams, gorges, and temples were no longer generic features of a mountain range; they became recognizable places associated with specific acts of cultivation, memory, and writing. In this way, poetry helped transform sacred geography into cultural landscape. What had been sanctified in monastic and historiographical discourse now became available for repeated literary visitation.

3.2. The Aestheticization of Sacred Space

Although Huiyuan’s community initiated the literary translation of Mount Lu’s sacred geography, later Southern Dynasties writers extended that process by approaching the mountain through sensory, affective, and esthetic experience. This did not amount to a secularization of Mount Lu. Rwather, it marked a new mode of engaging sacred space—one in which movement, vision, atmosphere, and emotion became integral to how the mountain’s inherited sanctity was experienced and expressed.

What changes in these later writings is not the disappearance of sacred meaning, but the manner in which it is accessed. Climbing Mount Lu becomes an embodied practice through which sanctity is experienced as effort, disorientation, exposure, exhilaration, and solitude. This shift corresponds to what Richard Mather (Mather 1958) called the medieval “discovery of nature,” when the physical world came to be treated not merely as a background for myth or moral example but as a medium of perception in its own right. The literati practice of ascending heights fundamentally transformed their relationship with the landscape. Rather than passively observing, medieval poets treated nature as a “site of re-enactment”, where the bodily strain of climbing and the sensory shock of the terrain became inseparable from spiritual insight. Consequently, the act of climbing evolved into an essential “occasion for poetry” (Schmidt-Glintzer 1999), turning elevated vistas into catalysts for a profound emotional spectrum, ranging from exaltation to melancholy. In writings on Mount Lu, this change appears above all in poems of ascent. Climbing the mountain no longer functions only as a symbol of spiritual withdrawal; it becomes a bodily and emotional experience that generates literary reflection. As later poets traversed Mount Lu, they internalized its sacredness through effort, disorientation, exhilaration, and solitude.

Xie Lingyun 謝靈運 (385–433), for example, transforms the mountain into a site of personal longing and incomplete companionship. In one poem, he laments, “I regret there is no kindred spirit, To climb the ladder of blue clouds with me” (惜無同懷客，共登青雲梯) (Xie 2008, p. 111). The line recalls the earlier communal world of Huiyuan’s circle, but recasts it through the sensibility of the solitary traveler. Bao Zhao 鮑照 (414–466), by contrast, emphasizes ecstatic immersion in the mountain’s distance and verticality: “Embracing this joy of mountains and a passion for distant roaming, I tread the path of feathered immortals, joining forever with the mist” (乘此樂山性，重以遠遊情。方躋羽人途，永與煙霧並) (Bao 2008, p. 284). Liu Shan similarly situates himself within a layered historical landscape: “Qin Shi Huang gazed over the universe; /Han Wudi raised his banners here. /I build my hut dividing ancient records, /my boat remaining to reflect the passing years” (秦始眺宇宙，漢武上旌旃。結廬分往籍，留艑映遐年) (Lu 1983, p. 2548). In each case, Mount Lu becomes a space in which personal emotion, historical reflection, and inherited sanctity are brought together.

This literary mode also registers the material specificity of the mountain with new intensity. In Deng Lushan jue ding wang zhu jiao 登廬山絕頂望諸嶠 (Gazing at the Peaks from the Summit of Mount Lu), Xie Lingyun writes: “Stacked gorges suddenly open again; level paths abruptly end. Ridges and peaks crowd together; No tracks of wheels or footprints from the past” (積峽忽復啟，平途俄已絕。巒壟有合踏，往來無蹤轍) (Xie 2008, p. 136). Here Mount Lu is experienced as difficult terrain rather than merely symbolic height. Bao Zhao attends to vegetation and geological form: “By caves and streams earth’s veins are glimpsed; /in lofty trees heaven’s design is hidden” (洞澗窺地脈，聳樹隱天經) (Bao 2008, p. 284). Jiang Yan 江淹, in his poem on Incense Burner Peak, highlights the vivid life of the forest: “Fragrant herbs shine with fresh brilliance; jade trees stand in true verdure” (瑤草正翕赩，玉樹信蔥青) (Jiang 2006, p. 103). Xie Lingyun notes the mountain’s severe climate: “Day and night it veils the sun and moon; /Through winter and summer, it shares the frost and snow” (晝夜蔽日月，冬夏共霜雪) (Xie 2008, p. 136). Later, Xiao Gang 蕭綱 emphasizes mist, fragrance, and wind: “Distant mist rises, holding the mountain’s form; wind scatters blossoms, transmitting their fragrance” (遠煙生兮含山勢，風散花兮傳馨香) (Lu 1983, p. 1978). What matters here is not only the emergence of natural description, but the way description itself becomes a mode of inhabiting sacred space. The mountain is measured by the body, apprehended through the senses, and translated into literary form. In this sense, later literati do not abandon the sacred Mount Lu fashioned by Huiyuan and Buddhist historiography. Rather, they extend it by attaching sacred value to travel, perception, and esthetic responsiveness. The result is a more expansive sacred landscape—one no longer confined to miracle narratives or temple memory, but distributed across the mountain’s paths, climates, sounds, and vistas.

Mount Lu’s continuing Buddhist associations also help explain why this aestheticization mattered so much. The mountain was not simply beautiful. It was already saturated with monastic memory, textual authority, and the prestige of reclusion. Later poets thus encountered it as what might be called a cultural reservoir: a place where sensory experience was always shadowed by the presence of earlier communities, earlier writings, and earlier forms of sanctity. Every ascent became, in part, a return.

3.3. Intertextual Writing and Textual Circulation

A further development in this process was the consolidation of Mount Lu as an intertextual cultural space. By this point, the mountain’s significance no longer depended solely on Buddhist institutions, even though Buddhism remained central to its identity. Mount Lu had become a site onto which Buddhist, Daoist, and Confucian meanings could all be projected, negotiated, and remembered. This plurality did not erase its Buddhist sacrality; it was one of the conditions under which that sacrality continued to circulate in the wider literary tradition.

From an early stage, Huiyuan’s community was not intellectually isolated. Its members were conversant with Confucian learning and deeply shaped by vocabularies also active in Daoist thought. The sacred landscape they fashioned was therefore open to more than one register of interpretation. Later writers expanded this potential: some approached Mount Lu through Pure Land devotion, some through ideals of reclusion and spontaneity, and others through concerns with dynastic history and moral self-positioning. The mountain’s literary durability lay partly in this interpretive openness.

This layered reception can be seen in the way commemorative writing worked. As Kenneth Ch’en notes, Pure Land devotion increasingly emphasized faith in Amitābha and aspiration for rebirth through the power of the Buddha (Ch’en 1973, p. 77). At Mount Lu, these theological ideas were attached to specific sites and memories associated with Huiyuan. Poets sought out those places not only to admire scenery but also to enter a preexisting field of religious meaning. In this sense, Mount Lu’s landscapes became commemorative landscapes: places where writing mediated between past and present, presence and absence, travel and memory. As Li Xuan argues, such commemorative landscapes function as carriers of collective memory (X. Li 2021, p. 82).

Xie Lingyun’s Jingtu yong 淨土詠 (Ode to the Pure Land), composed after his visit to Mount Lu, shows how literary engagement with the mountain could activate Buddhist themes well beyond explicitly monastic writing. Likewise, Liu Xiaochuo’s 劉孝綽 poem on Donglin si 東林寺 (Donglin Temple) preserves and reshapes the sensory vocabulary associated with Huiyuan’s community: temple bells, wind chimes, morning ape calls, and the acoustics of the mountain environment all become part of a recognizable literary repertoire (Lu 1983, p. 1828). Such poems do not merely document the temple; they integrate its sounds, rhythms, and atmosphere into a durable poetic image of Mount Lu.

At the same time, Daoist and reclusive modes of perception remained active within this literary tradition. The Gaoseng zhuan notes Huiyuan’s command of texts such as the Laozi and Zhuangzi (Shi 1992, p. 211), and later writers likewise found in Mount Lu a landscape congenial to Daoist forms of withdrawal and naturalness. Zhang Zhengjian’s writing on Daoist sites at Mount Lu and Wu Maiyuan’s 吳邁遠 You Lushan guan daoshi shishi 遊廬山觀道士石室 (Visiting a Daoist Hermitage on Mount Lu) both show that the mountain could sustain non-Buddhist forms of spiritual identification without ceasing to be marked by Huiyuan’s legacy. This is precisely what made Mount Lu so resilient as a cultural space: it could absorb distinct traditions while preserving the authority of its Buddhist past.

The cumulative effect of these writings was to make Mount Lu function as a vast intertext. Later poets did not encounter the mountain as raw nature. They encountered it through the sediment of earlier texts. Peaks, temples, streams, and hermitages were legible because generations of writing had already attached meanings to them. Each new text thus entered into relation with older ones, sometimes affirming them, sometimes revising them, but always participating in a larger process of memory-making. Mount Lu’s sacredness, then, was not fixed once and for all in the age of Huiyuan. It survived because it remained open to reinterpretation.

For this reason, the cultural history of Mount Lu is best understood not in terms of a single, exclusive religious discourse, but as the product of sustained interaction among Buddhist sanctity, Daoist esthetics, and Confucian historical consciousness. Literati writing made the mountain into a space where these traditions could coexist and where inherited sacredness could be repeatedly reactivated across changing historical contexts. In Wendy Darby’s terms, such landscapes are not static containers of meaning, but dynamic sites in which cultural values and historical memory are actively negotiated (Darby 2020, p. 9).

Mount Lu did not remain sacred simply because Huiyuan’s community once flourished there. It remained sacred because later writers continued to reactivate its Buddhist associations through poetic visitation, sensory description, and intertextual remembrance. Literati writing thus did not merely embellish a sacred mountain already formed; it was one of the historical processes by which Mount Lu’s Buddhist sacrality was transmitted, expanded, and made durable.

4. Constructing Mount Lu as a Site of Memory

Once Mount Lu had been repeatedly described, revisited, and reinterpreted, it came to function not only as a sacred Buddhist landscape but also as a locus of cultural memory. Later writers returned to it in order to recall Huiyuan, to position themselves within established literary and religious lineages, and to imagine forms of spiritual and cultural refuge. In this sense, Mount Lu endured not simply through miracle accounts or esthetic appreciation, but through its continuing availability as a remembered and rewritable place.

4.1. Remembering Mount Lu as a “Spiritual Refuge”

Unlike mountains whose prestige was more fully stabilized through the classical cult of the Five Peaks or through established Daoist sacred geographies, Mount Lu acquired authority through a more cumulative process of monastic settlement, textual production, and literati reception. Huiyuan was central to this transformation. His defense of monastic autonomy in On Monks Not Bowing to Kings helped define Mount Lu as a space set apart from ordinary political hierarchies. This claim did not by itself make Mount Lu a “refuge” for later writers, but it provided an important precedent: the mountain could be imagined as a place where religious life and moral self-cultivation operated according to values different from those of the court.

If the religious foundations of Mount Lu were laid in the Eastern Jin and the Southern Dynasties, Tang writers extended those foundations by treating the mountain increasingly as a place of recollection, withdrawal, and moral reflection. For many scholar-officials, Mount Lu signified more than a remote monastic retreat. Building on the earlier legacy of Huiyuan and Donglin, Tang poetry often reimagined the mountain’s distance from the court as a condition for contemplative detachment and self-reorientation. For scholar-officials burdened by the examination system, bureaucratic discipline, and factional conflict, Mount Lu came to signify more than a distant monastic retreat; it became a refuge for the self. Building on the textual legacy of Huiyuan’s community, Tang poets reinterpreted the mountain’s distance from the court not simply as geographical remoteness, but as a condition for spiritual recollection and self-cultivation. Through continued literary accretion, Mount Lu was transformed from a physical mountain into a spiritually accessible landscape. As James Robson has noted in his studies of China’s sacred mountains, the vitality of such sites depends heavily on sustained textual transmission and cultural reconfiguration (Robson 2009). Within the Chinese intellectual tradition, Mount Lu thus came to function as a recurring symbol of spiritual refuge, maintained simultaneously through its material topography and its literary afterlife.

This shift is particularly evident in Tang poetry, in which temple visits and encounters with monks became an integral part of experiencing the landscape. Rather than viewing Mount Lu simply as a scenic object from afar, Tang literati engaged directly with its religious spaces and incorporated elements of monastic life into poetic representation. Meng Haoran’s Jiyu buzhi Longquan si 疾癒步至龍泉寺 (Recovering from Illness and Visiting Longquan Temple) provides a clear example:

• [I go to] seek the woods [and] gather [rare] lingzhi,
• Circling valleygus where pines grow lush and dense.
• A quiet cloister emerges before my eyes,
• As monks complete their mid-day repast.
• My heart finds peace alongside the drifting clouds,
• And my spirit draws near to the serene hills.
(尋林采芝去，轉谷松翠密。傍見精舍開，長廊飯僧畢……) (Meng 2018, p. 33)

Here the “scenery” consists not only of pines and valleys, but also of the “quiet cloister” (jingshe 精舍) and the completed monastic meal (fanseng bi 飯僧畢). The landscape is humanized through the presence of the saṅgha, and the drifting clouds carry a spiritual charge that exceeds mere meteorology. The poem suggests that recovery is not simply bodily but existential, made possible through contact with the ordered life of the monastery. In this sense, Mount Lu appears as a lived counter-space, one that invites temporary release from the social pressures of official life.

This is close to what Michel Foucault terms a “Heterotopia”: a real place that functions as a counter-site to the mundane world, where the social protocols of the Tang court are suspended in favor of another mode of being. Li Bai similarly reimagined Mount Lu as a place in which Buddhist metaphysical insight could be internalized. In Donglin yehuai 東林寺夜懷 (Night Thoughts at Donglin Temple), he turns the mountain into a medium for the dissolution of ordinary spatial boundaries:

• In serene repose, unmoved and still,
• The vast universe converges at the tip of a hair.
• Clear and profound, the true mind illuminates,
• Transcending endless kalpas and freed from rise and fall.
(宴坐寂不動，大千入毫髮。湛然冥真心，曠劫斷出沒) (B. Li 1977, p. 1075)

Drawing on the Buddhist paradoxes of the Vimalakīrti Sūtra, Li Bai no longer treats the mountain primarily as a destination reached by travel. Instead, Mount Lu becomes a medium through which the “true mind” is apprehended. This marks an important stage in the textual afterlife of the mountain: sacred space is interiorized. Places such as Incense Burner Peak and Donglin Temple become portable spiritual images, capable of being recalled and reinhabited through poetry. In this way, Mount Lu remained a “protected space” for the literati, not only as a destination of travel but as a refuge that could be summoned through memory and verse even from the capital.

Huiyuan himself functioned as an essential mnemonic figure in this process. By retracing his footsteps, Tang poets such as Li Qi 李頎 and Liu Changqing 劉長卿 transformed literary pilgrimage into a practice of historical affiliation. In such poems, Yuan Gong 遠公 (Master Yuan) appears less as a remote historical monk than as a continuing presence who mediated access to the mountain’s sacred past. This is close to what Yi-Fu Tuan calls “topophilia”—a deep affective bond between people and place (Tuan 1990). Through this bond, sites such as Donglin Temple became temporal conduits linking the Tang present to the Eastern Jin past. Mount Lu thus emerged as a kind of memory palace in which the history of Chinese Buddhism and the ideals of literati self-cultivation could be preserved together.

A central expression of this mnemonic function is the legend of the “Three Sages of the Tiger Stream” (Huxi sanxiao 虎溪三笑). The story of Huiyuan, the Daoist Lu Xiujing, and the poet Tao Yuanming 陶淵明 laughing together after crossing the boundary of the stream became a recurrent motif in later poetry and painting. In later literary and visual culture, this story became a powerful shorthand for the possibility of concord across the three teachings. Whether or not the legend should be projected fully back onto the earliest phases of Mount Lu’s history, its later prominence is significant: it shows that Mount Lu was remembered not only as a Buddhist site, but also as a space in which Buddhist, Daoist, and literati values could be brought into symbolic relation.

4.2. Preserving Mount Lu as Cultural Memory

Although Mount Lu functioned for Tang literati as a refuge for the self, it also became, through their writing, a durable archive of cultural memory. Tang poetic engagements with the mountain were not simple imitations of nature. They reactivated earlier associations, rearranged inherited images, and generated new forms of cultural meaning. If the religious coordinate of Mount Lu offered a place of spiritual withdrawal, its literary coordinate provided the vocabulary through which that withdrawal could be imagined and shared. As T. S. Eliot observed, the poet’s mind acts as a “receptor” where emotions and images combine to “form a new compound” (Eliot 1991). In the case of Mount Lu, this new cultural meaning emerged because later poets did not merely copy the past; instead, they continuously reshaped inherited images through their own creative transformations. The mountain was not only a physical reality; it was also a literary reality formed through centuries of accumulated writing. Two especially powerful images illustrate this process: the waterfall and the thatched hut. The waterfall of Mount Lu became one of the most important anchors of the mountain’s cultural memory. Huiyuan had already described it in religiously inflected terms as “misty like fragrant smoke” (yinyun ruo xiangyan 氤氳若香煙), but Tang poets made the waterfall into a site of poetic rivalry and symbolic intensification. Zhang Jiuling’s Hukou wang Lushan pubuquan 湖口望廬山瀑布泉 (Gazing at the Mount Lu Waterfall) (Zhang 2008) offered an early Tang model by associating the falls with “purple mist” and celestial imagery. Yet it was Li Bai who transformed this natural feature into one of the most enduring poetic symbols in Chinese literary history in Gazing at the Wang Lushan Pubu 望廬山瀑布 (Mount Lu Waterfall):

• Sunlight on Incense Burner Peak ignites a purple mist;
• From afar, I gaze at the waterfall cascading over the river.
• Its torrents plunge three thousand feet—
• As if the Silver River fell from the ninth heaven.
(日照香爐生紫煙，遙看瀑布掛前川。飛流直下三千尺，疑是銀河落九天。) (B. Li 1977, p. 989)

Li Bai’s image of the Silver River became so influential that later poets had to respond to it either by echoing or revising it. The “three thousand feet” are not simply a topographical measurement; they register the extension of poetic imagination itself. Through this poem, the waterfall ceased to be only a natural object and became a sublime literary image. In this sense, Li Bai’s waterfall is not just water, but a manifestation of qi (氣), a force that connects the earthly mountain to the cosmic order.

While the waterfall represents one pole of Mount Lu’s cultural memory, the thatched hut represents another. Where Li Bai’s Mount Lu remains associated with the celestial, Bai Juyi’s Mount Lu becomes intimate and habitable. After his demotion to Jiangzhou in 815, Bai Juyi sought consolation in the memory of Huiyuan and the Eighteen Worthies of the Lotus Society. His construction of the “Lushan Thatched Hut” and his Caotang Ji 草堂記 (Record of the Thatched Hut) transformed Mount Lu into a model of poetic dwelling. Bai’s prose is particularly important for the history of Chinese esthetics because it reconstructs the mountain not as an overwhelming spectacle, but as a lived microcosm. In this description, Mount Lu is no longer a distant object of reverence. It is domesticated without being desacralized. The mountain becomes wearable, habitable, and rhythmically integrated into everyday life. Bai Juyi continues this sensibility in You Erlin Si 遊二林寺 (Spring Outing to Erlin Temple):

• When body and mind are free of care, it is easy to drift without fear.
• I reflect on those eighteen noble men;
• From ancient times to now, we share this peace.
(身閒易飄泊，官散無牽迫。緬彼十八人，古今同此適。) (Bai 2006, p. 609)

Here the “eighteen men” are not remote historical figures, but spiritual companions across time. For Bai Juyi, Mount Lu offers not only temporary escape, but a reproducible ideal of cultivated dwelling. His contribution to the sacred space of Mount Lu lies in translating monastic serenity into an esthetic form accessible to the scholar-official. Through Bai’s prose and poetry, the mountain became a portable model of refuge: an arrangement of sensory, spatial, and ethical relations that could be re-created elsewhere in gardens, studies, and acts of recollection. This movement from the explicitly religious sacred to the esthetically inhabited sacred is one of the most significant features of Mount Lu’s Tang reconstruction.

A different layer of Mount Lu’s memory appears in Han Yu, whose engagement with the mountain is shaped less by celestial sublimity than by historical and ethical consciousness. In You Xilin Si Ti Xiao Erxiong Langzhong Jiu Tang 遊西林寺題蕭二兄郎中舊堂 (On the Former Dwelling of My Friend Xiao at Xilin Monastery), Han Yu offers a deliberate counterpoint to Li Bai’s cosmic imagination. Rather than seeking transcendence through vastness, he grounds Mount Lu in human traces and historical continuity:

• A daughter remains, like Zhonglang’s, to pass on your learning,
• But no son, like Bodao’s, is left to guard the home.
• Chancing upon this mountain retreat where once you dwelled,
• A few rows of withered tears fall into the glowing mist.
(中郎有女能傳業，伯道無兒可保家。偶到匡山曾住處，幾行衰淚落煙霞。) (Han 2012, p. 623)

Fundamentally, this poem by Han Yu records a profound friendship, capturing his grief over the passing of an old friend. Such genuine emotion adds an invaluable dimension of “personal affect” to the sacrality of Mount Lu. To articulate this sorrow, Han Yu employs two classical allusions rooted deeply in Confucian family ethics. Zhonglang refers to Cai Yong (蔡邕, 133–192), a Han dynasty scholar whose legacy was preserved by his talented daughter, Cai Yan (蔡琰). Bodao refers to Deng You (鄧攸, d. 326), a Jin dynasty official who tragically died without a male heir. What makes this expression of grief so remarkable is the spatial and ideological context in which it occurs. It is crucial to note that Han Yu was a prominent anti-Buddhist polemicist of the Tang dynasty—a staunch defender of Confucian orthodoxy (daotong 道統), who was famously exiled for his Memorial on the Buddha’s Relic (Jian ying fo gu biao 諫迎佛骨表). Yet, he sheds these tears at Mount Kuang (a classical alias for Mount Lu), standing within the precincts of Xilin Temple, a Buddhist monastic institution. The image of a fiercely anti-Buddhist Confucian scholar weeping for a deceased friend inside a Buddhist temple generates a profound spatial and ideological tension. By projecting these deep-seated Confucian anxieties concerning lineage and filial transmission onto the ethereal “misty clouds” of a Buddhist landscape, Han Yu creates a poignant synthesis of human ethical grief and spatial transcendence. This dynamic illustrates that the allure of Mount Lu transcended any single religious or ideological affiliation. Whether one was a devotee or a detractor, a recluse or a bureaucrat, the mountain offered a space for spiritual anchorage and emotional resonance. Han Yu’s “intrusion” into this space and his subsequent reflections precisely demonstrate that, as a cultural sacred mountain, Mount Lu embodied a deeply inclusive, pluralistic, and complex spatial meaning.

In this respect, Mount Lu increasingly resembles what Aleida Assmann called a form of cultural memory (Assmann 2011). It became a place where a community’s sense of itself—especially the ideal of the reclusive scholar (yinshi 隱士)—could be anchored and transmitted. Within the precincts of Donglin Temple, Incense Burner Peak, or the imagined space of the thatched hut, the rigid hierarchies of the court could be replaced by other forms of value: spiritual attainment, literary sensitivity, and historical depth. The mountain thus offered a “protected space” in which psychological autonomy could be cultivated. At the same time, its cultural meaning remained profoundly syncretic. The core was Buddhist, but the language was often Daoist in imagery and Confucian in ethical orientation. Tang literati incorporated temple visits, incense burning, and conversations with monks into their broader travel culture, turning religious acts into signs of cultural refinement and philosophical openness. Mount Lu thus became a laboratory of the self, a place where poets could test different modes of intellectual and spiritual identity.

The textual construction of Mount Lu consequently functioned as a kind of cultural palimpsest. Successive generations layered new concerns onto places already marked by earlier religious and literary associations. What the mountain offered amid political and historical change was a measure of continuity: it remained available as a setting in which writers could negotiate exile, friendship, withdrawal, devotion, and historical remembrance. Its durability lay not in the fixity of a single meaning, but in the repeated rewriting of a shared landscape. As Jean-François Billeter notes, such landscapes could provide a “protected space” for “unconstrained wandering”, a form of psychological autonomy central to the Chinese literati tradition (Billeter 1990).

In this sense, the Tang remaking of Mount Lu involved both the humanization of inherited sanctity and the sacralization of literati experience. Through poetry and prose, the mountain’s religious significance no longer belonged only to miracle tales or monastic institutions. It became available as an enduring medium through which later writers could align self-cultivation, historical memory, and sacred geography. Mount Lu thus survived not merely as a mountain in Jiangxi, but as a durable and repeatedly reactivated site of religious-cultural memory.

5. Conclusions

This study has traced the historical process by which Mount Lu was transformed from a regional landscape into a Buddhist sacred mountain in early medieval China. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s framework of the production of space, it has argued that Mount Lu’s sanctity was historically produced rather than inherently given. It emerged through monastic spatial practice, textual representation, literati inscription, and the long afterlife of cultural memory. Under Huiyuan’s leadership, Mount Lu was reconfigured through the foundation of Donglin Temple, the devotional and communal practices associated with his circle, and a growing body of historiographical, commemorative, and literary writing that linked the mountain to Buddhist authority and spiritual cultivation. The sacralization of Mount Lu was therefore achieved through the interaction of material institutions, ritualized practices, and discursive production. Donglin Temple provided an institutional and spatial center for monastic life; devotional practices inscribed religious meaning into the landscape; and Buddhist biographies, geographical writing, and literati texts circulated that meaning beyond the mountain through wider networks of reading, commemoration, and remembrance. Mount Lu thus emerged not merely as a site of retreat or scenic admiration, but as a Buddhist sacred landscape produced through repeated acts of dwelling, writing, ritualization, and recollection. Unlike later Buddhist mountains that relied more heavily on imperial patronage, mature cultic systems, or large-scale pilgrimage formations, Mount Lu demonstrates an earlier and more localized pattern of sacralization. Its authority was established cumulatively through the interaction of monastic settlement, textualization, literati participation, and cultural memory. The case of Mount Lu contributes to a broader understanding of the localization of Buddhism in China by showing that sacred geography could be made not only through doctrine and institutional expansion, but also through the production of place itself. In this sense, Mount Lu represents an important early model of Buddhist sacralization, one in which sacred space was historically constituted through the interplay of monastic practice, textual inscription, place-making, and memory.

From the foregoing discussion, it becomes clear that the sacred space of early Mount Lu was characterized by a distinctly “bottom-up” mode of formation. Its sacred authority did not stem from direct imperial bestowal; rather, it emerged through the combined agency of local monastic practice, the textual construction of eminent monks’ biographies, and the cultural participation of the literati. In this process, the interaction between Buddhism and indigenous literati culture was particularly significant. As Susan E. Nelson has noted, both the imagery of reclusion associated with Tao Yuanming and the later visual tradition of the “Three Laughers at Tiger Stream” suggest that Mount Lu was early on fashioned as a “cultural sacred site” in which landscape esthetics, transcendent ideals, and the syncretic ethos of the Three Teachings converged (Nelson 2001, pp. 11–43). Early Mount Lu, therefore, was neither dominated by the cult of a particular bodhisattva nor defined by a single sectarian affiliation. Rather, it took shape as a localized sacred space constituted through the interweaving of natural scenery, reclusion traditions, Buddhist communal cultivation, and literati social exchange.

A comparison with Mount Wutai, one of the most prominent Buddhist sacred mountains in China, further highlights the distinctiveness of this early mode of spatial production. In contrast to Mount Lu, the sacralization of Mount Wutai followed a more “top-down” model, characterized above all by the establishment of a specific bodhisattva cultic center and by sustained intervention from state power. As recorded in Yan Yi’s Guang Qingliang zhuan 廣清涼傳 (The Biography of Guang Qingliang) of the Northern Song dynasty, Emperor Ming of the Han founded Dafu Lingjiu Monastery, Emperor Xiaowen of the Northern Wei repeatedly paid homage to the mountain, and the Tang court sponsored the construction of Da Huayan Monastery for Chengguan. Such narratives not only endowed Mount Wutai with sacred geographical legitimacy as the “Eastern Vulture Peak,” but also reveal the crucial role of imperial patronage in its sacralization (Yan 2013, p. 46). As Wei-Cheng Lin (Lin 2014) has argued, the making of Mount Wutai’s sacred space depended heavily on imperial endorsement and monumental state-sponsored construction projects, and thus carried a markedly political dimension. Wen-shing Chou likewise demonstrates that this top-down model continued in later periods, as Mount Wutai was repeatedly redefined by emperors and Inner Asian monks, eventually becoming a key center of imperial Buddhism and transregional pilgrimage (Chou 2018, p. 11). If Mount Wutai exemplifies a centralized spatial model in which a bodhisattva cult was closely bound to state power, then early Mount Lu offers a strikingly different sacred paradigm: one rooted in the interaction of monastic association, literati writing, and the natural landscape, and shaped by the intersection of local religious practice and regional cultural networks.

The distinctiveness of Mount Lu becomes even more apparent when it is situated alongside contemporaneous Daoist sacred mountains. In medieval Daoism, the construction of sacred mountains was often organized around the notion of dongtian fudi 洞天福地 (Grotto Heavens). As Franciscus Verellen has pointed out, these “cavern-heavens” were not merely scenic sites, but concealed interior realms that linked the human world to otherworldly domains (Verellen 1995, p. 265). By contrast, although Huiyuan and his community at Mount Lu shared the broader cultural ideal of mountain reclusion, their spatial practices reoriented the significance of the mountain toward a form of communal Buddhist life centered on monastic discipline, Buddha-invocation, meditative cultivation, and aspiration for rebirth in the Pure Land. In this sense, the sacredness of Mount Lu no longer depended on the notion of immortals inhabiting the mountain or on the cosmological logic of hidden cavern realms. Rather, it was generated through religious practices directed toward rebirth in the Pure Land. The mountain was thus transformed from a concealed realm for a small number of immortals withdrawing from the world into a Buddhist “prototype of Pure Land” constructed within the lived landscape of this world. It is precisely in this respect that Mount Lu occupies such a suggestive place in the history of medieval Chinese religious space.