Structure Type: Buddhist Monastery 佛寺.
Location: Great Jing [Family] Village, Hunyuan County, Shanxi Province 山西省渾源縣大荊莊村. The monastery was located outside and to the west of the walls of the old village fort, although the original street-plan is now hard to reconstruct.
Period: Undated. These murals represent something of a mystery to me. The structure should be from the Liao period (916-1125), and on one wall where the newer plaster has been scraped off, you can see the fine Liao-Song style Buddhas beneath. The upper level of murals is actually harder to place. The color scheme of blues and greens suggests a 19th century date. My personal theory about these is that they were copied whole from the main hall of the Monastery of Everlasting Peace 永安寺 in the nearby Hunyuan county town 渾源縣城. Although I wasn’t allowed to photograph at this site, the two rear walls of this hall have mid-Qing Wisdom Kings 明王 that match these almost exactly. Thus the Great Cloud Monastery murals may represent an earlier composition painted in a 19th century palette. I have no proof of this theory.
Artist: Unknown.
Mural Contents: There are two layers to the murals. The lower layer, now covered over on all walls, shows Buddhas with attendants in beautiful Liao-dynasty style.
The upper layer, which now predominates, show the Ten Wisdom Kings (vidyārāja, 十明王). These are wrathful deities from the esoteric pantheon, each of which represent the “transformation body” 變化身 of a particular Buddha or Boddhisattva. To my knowledge, Great Cloud Monastery is unique in having full-wall murals devoted only to the Wisdom Kings; in almost all other cases these deities are depicted in the context of the Feast of Water and Land 水陸齋 ritual. Again, I have an un-sourced theory to explain this: this monastery must once have possessed the Water and Land images in movable scroll form. Thus they painted the Wisdom Kings on the walls here to indicate the inner maṇḍala of the rite. Afterward the Water and Land scrolls were destroyed or dispersed, and now only these murals remain.
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