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A Study on the Correlation between the Scale of Buddhist Temples and Statues of the Buddha in ancient East Asia

Han joung ho 1

1동국대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

A Buddhist temple is a structure to enshrine Buddhist statues, so the scale and form of the Buddhist statue are the preconditions to set up the space inside the Buddhist temple. This article considers how the scale of the Buddhist statue influences the establishment of the space inside an ancient Buddhist temple in East Asia. First of all, according to the result of examining the scriptures and ancient literatures about the size of Buddhist statues, generally the Buddhist statue with the smallest scale enshrined as the main statue of a Buddhist temple is Deungsinbul(等身佛). And it may differ by what material is used, but when the Buddhist statue bigger than the scale of Jangyuk(丈六) Buddhist statue is to be enshrined in main hall, in many of the cases, the Buddhist statue is enshrined before building main hall. And Deungsinbul has greater meaning as a Buddhist statue constructed identically as the body of a certain figure rather than its meaning as a Buddhist statue in the scale of the human body. In order to figure out the correlation between a Buddhist statue’s scale and the space where it is enshrined, the study analyzes Seokgulam(石窟庵). According to the result, it has been found that the space of the main room in Seokgulam was planned and built correspondingly to the size of the main statue. The facade of the main room in Seokgulam was set up as being twice as high as the main seated statue with the pedestal as the starting point. The width of the plane does not violate it, either. As a human being’s residential space should secure the smallest height higher than a person’s height and the plane where a person can lie down, we can analyze that the internal space of the Buddhist temple is to be set up applying the same preconditions according to the size of the Buddhist statue. In order to verify the possibility that the principle of Buddhist statue enshrinement figured out by the analysis on Seokgulam may have been generally applied to ancient Buddhist temples in East Asia, the study focuses on the sacrarium part in ancient Buddhist temples. The sacrarium part of a Buddhist temple is the space built purely for Buddhist statue enshrinement, and it is distinguished from the space for Buddhist service. According to the result of comparing the plane of the sacrarium part in the existing ancient Buddhist temples of East Asia and the size of the main statue, twice of the Buddhist statue’s height or the Buddhist statue’s height including the pedestal tends to correspond to the width of the side of the sacrarium part, and even if it does not correspond, it never exceeds it. And about the height of the facade in the sacrarium part, when the main statue is a seated one, twice of the Buddhist statue’s height never deviates from the height of ridge beam of the Buddhist temple. Also, it has been found that this principle is also applied to the Buddhist temples in the era of Tōdai-ji in Japan whose Buddhist statue’s height is up to 16 meters. This supports that it was applied as the precondition for building ancient Buddhist temples. The correlation between the space of the sacrarium part in ancient Buddhist temples and the scale of Buddhist statues which has been figured out through above consideration reflects ancient people’s consciousness of Buddhist statues. We can understand that the Buddhist statues were not mere sculptures replacing Buddha but demanded spatial consideration to maintain their divinity as a divine statue with life.

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