Activating Doctrine: Buddhist Architecture in Late Chosŏn Korea

This lecture examines a largely overlooked category of visual and textual material in late Chosŏn Buddhist art: inscriptions written on ceilings and other upper architectural surfaces. In temple halls rebuilt between the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, ceilings were densely inscribed with seed syllables, dhāraṇī, and doctrinal phrases distributed across lotus-painted coffered panels above the altar. The case studies discussed in this lecture show how these inscriptions articulated apotropaic concerns, framed scriptural authority, and enabled doctrinal hierarchy or simultaneity. By foregrounding ceilings as sites of doctrinal articulation, the lecture reframes late Chosŏn Buddhist temples as epistemological environments in which knowledge was ordered and transmitted through architecture itself.