The scholarly consensus holds that Pure Land Buddhism was transmitted to China from India through Central Asia primarily as a series of textual transmissions. The popularity of this cult in seventh-century medieval China is seen as the direct result of the writings and proselytizing of Chinese scholar-monks interested in propagating “Amitabha faith.” In this dissertation I present research that helps scholars begin to modify this long-held view.

I focus on the period before the seventh-century scholastic invention of the “Pure Land path.” Between the fourth century and the sixth century, the worship of Amitabha in China was widespread, extremely varied, but not yet organized nor the focus of proselytization by elite scholar-monks. The primary sources that I examine—hundreds of prayers for the dead inscribed on stone images, Buddhist miracle tales, hagiographies of monks and nuns, apocryphal scriptures—all date before the seventh century, and they provide an alternate view of the pre-history of the later scholastic Pure Land movement. To further flesh out the context of the early Amitabha cults in China, I also analyze the Chinese making of the early medieval cults of the Buddhist deities Maitreya and Samantabhadra, particularly focusing on the critical roles that so-called “visualization apocrypha” played in the codification and propagation of the worship of these two deities.

My analysis shows that the early worship of Amitabha in China, rather than a case of textual transmission and commentary writing at the elite levels, was rooted in a rapidly burgeoning Chinese Buddhist mortuary culture that was popular, complex, and non-sectarian. The cult of Amit abha had to be remade in China first of all as a form of ritual practice, to reflect the social world of early medieval China and to accord with fundamental Chinese Buddhist assumptions about ritual power and moral agency. The period before the rise of the seventh-century scholarly invention of the “Pure Land path” was a time of creative work, and it certainly was not, as commonly seen, just a dim precursor to the institutional and elite successes of later centuries.