Dedicatory Inscriptions on the Amitabha Buddha and Maitreya Bodhisattva Sculptures of Gamsansa Temple (감산사(甘山寺) 아미타불상(阿彌陁佛像)과 미륵보살상(彌勒菩薩像) 조상기(造像記)의 연구)
-
- MISULJARYO - National Museum of Korea Art Journal
- /
- v.98
- /
- pp.22-53
- /
- 2020
This paper analyzes the contents, characteristics, and historical significance of the dedicatory inscriptions (josanggi) on the Amitabha Buddha and the Maitreya Bodhisattva statues of Gamsansa Temple, two masterpieces of Buddhist sculpture from the Unified Silla period. In the first section, I summarize research results from the past century (divided into four periods), before presenting a new perspective and methodology that questions the pre-existing notion that the Maitreya Bodhisattva has a higher rank than the Amitabha Buddha. In the second section, through my own analysis of the dedicatory inscriptions, arrangement, and overall appearance of the two images, I assert that the Amitabha Buddha sculpture actually held a higher rank and greater significance than the Maitreya Bodhisattva sculpture. In the third section, for the first time, I provide a new interpretation of two previously undeciphered characters from the inscriptions. In addition, by comparing the sentence structures from the respective inscriptions and revising the current understanding of the author (chanja) and calligrapher (seoja), I elucidate the possible meaning of some ambiguous phrases. Finally, in the fourth section, I reexamine the content of both inscriptions, differentiating between the parts relating to the patron (josangju), the dedication (josang), and the prayers of the patrons or donors (balwon). In particular, I argue that the phrase "for my deceased parents" is not merely a general axiom, but a specific reference. To summarize, the dedicatory inscriptions can be interpreted as follows: when Kim Jiseong's parents died, they were cremated and he scattered most of their remains by the East Sea. But years later, he regretted having no physical memorial of them to which to pay his respects. Thus, in his later years, he donated his estate on Gamsan as alms and led the construction of Gamsansa Temple. He then commissioned the production of the two stone sculptures of Amitabha Buddha and Maitreya Bodhisattva for the temple, asking that they be sculpted realistically to reflect the actual appearance of his parents. Finally, he enshrined the remains of his parents in the sculptures through the hole in the back of the head (jeonghyeol). The Maitreya Bodhisattva is a standing image with a nirmanakaya, or "transformation Buddha," on the crown. As various art historians have pointed out, this iconography is virtually unprecedented among Maitreya images in East Asian Buddhist sculpture, leading some to speculate that the standing image is actually the Avalokitesvara. However, anyone who reads the dedicatory inscription can have no doubt that this image is in fact the Maitreya. To ensure that the sculpture properly embodied his mother (who wished to be reborn in Tushita Heaven with Maitreya Bodhisattva), Kim Jiseong combined the iconography of the Maitreya and Avalokitesvara (the reincarnation of compassion). Hence, Kim Jiseong's deep love for his mother motivated him to modify the conventional iconography of the Maitreya and Avalokitesvara. A similar sentiment can be found in the sculpture of Amitabha Buddha. To this day, any visitor to the temple who first looks at the sculptures from the front before reading the text on the back will be deeply touched by the filial love of Kim Jiseong, who truly cherished the memory of his parents.
From January 2020 to October 2021, more than 500,000 academic studies related to COVID-19 (Coronavirus-2, a fatal respiratory syndrome) have been published. The rapid increase in the number of papers related to COVID-19 is putting time and technical constraints on healthcare professionals and policy makers to quickly find important research. Therefore, in this study, we propose a method of extracting useful information from text data of extensive literature using LDA and Word2vec algorithm. Papers related to keywords to be searched were extracted from papers related to COVID-19, and detailed topics were identified. The data used the CORD-19 data set on Kaggle, a free academic resource prepared by major research groups and the White House to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, updated weekly. The research methods are divided into two main categories. First, 41,062 articles were collected through data filtering and pre-processing of the abstracts of 47,110 academic papers including full text. For this purpose, the number of publications related to COVID-19 by year was analyzed through exploratory data analysis using a Python program, and the top 10 journals under active research were identified. LDA and Word2vec algorithm were used to derive research topics related to COVID-19, and after analyzing related words, similarity was measured. Second, papers containing 'vaccine' and 'treatment' were extracted from among the topics derived from all papers, and a total of 4,555 papers related to 'vaccine' and 5,971 papers related to 'treatment' were extracted. did For each collected paper, detailed topics were analyzed using LDA and Word2vec algorithms, and a clustering method through PCA dimension reduction was applied to visualize groups of papers with similar themes using the t-SNE algorithm. A noteworthy point from the results of this study is that the topics that were not derived from the topics derived for all papers being researched in relation to COVID-19 (