Title |
A Study on Architectural Decorative Design of the Silla Buddhist Reliquaries in the 7~8th Centuries |
Keywords |
Architectural Decorative Design ; The Buddhist Reliquary ; Sarira ; Ancient Architecture in Korea |
Abstract |
We study, in this paper, on the decorative design of the Treasure-architectural form for the Silla Buddhist reliquary and this research went through the observation on the Buddhist Reliquaries of the Song-Lim-Sa, the Eastern-Western three floor pagodas in the Kam-Eun-Sa, the three floor pagodas in the Bul-Guk-Sa and the reportedly discovered Nam-Won. The Buddhist reliquaries of these 5 Reliquaries, when compared with those of China and Japan in the same period, they worshiped the Buddhist reliquary as a Buddhist God itself and put them as a part of the architectural decoration, being installed in the construction forms. In the form and the composition of the architecture, we can see those having been designed with very detailed and brightly decorated form. The Buddhist reliquaries in the Song-Lim-Sa and Kam-Eun-Sa, the most important ones in this research, were in a royal palace shape having completely the altar part, interior space part, and the ceiling part, which inform us the whole structure of the architecture in details. In particular, for the case of Kam-Eun-Sa, the columns in the shape of bamboo trees, the expression of the gates, the terrace of double parts formed of word-shape Man(卍), and the statue of a general with superhuman ability in the shrine explain us the description of the Gyun-Bo-Tap-Pum of Lotus Sutra. After all these researches, we conclude that the Buddhist reliquaries in form of the Treasure-architecture represented the architectural style of the same period as a form of industrial arts and we can see that they tried to use all of their highly skilled and talented methods to describe the Buddhist Pure Land |