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This chapter discusses one of the most elaborate pictorial narratives on Buddha's nirvana from the medieval China of the Dayun Monastery in Yishin governed by Empress Wu. This stele was moved to the local Confucian temple and later to the provincial museum in Taiyuan. Its compositional program was labelled as niepan bian or literally “nirvana transformation.” The material and inscriptional evidence supports an interpretation of the pictorial nirvana narrative that decorated the stele as a localized response to the Wu Zhou regime, whose political ideology built on a particular understanding of Buddhist metaphysics prevalent in the seventh century. The pictorial narrative on the Shanxi stele tells the story of the transformation of the Buddha in three stages through the course of attaining nirvana. The story had its roots in scriptures, biographies, miracle tales, and prose compilations. This chapter also presents a narrative structure of Buddha's death.

This chapter discusses the largest reclining Buddha statue ever attempted, housed in a cave temple located near the southernmost tip of Mogao Caves outside Dunhuang. Known by today's numbering system as Cave 148, the structure was built literally to contain an eighteen-meter-long sculpture in an elongated, box-like interior with barrel-vault ceiling. In addition to Cave 148 of the Li family from the eighth century, a previous generation of the same clan also commissioned Cave 332 in 698. Both of the sculptures were built at critical moments in Dunhuang's history as a local response in support of Empress Wu's reign in the capital. Unlike any cave with a Buddhist pantheon so prominently displayed in the west niche as in Cave 45, both Caves 332 and 148 do not allow their viewers to see the colossal statue from the front of the cave.

This book focuses on the remarkable political career of Wu Zhao (624–705), China's first and only female emperor better known as Wu Zetian or Empress Wu. In the tortuous half century of her reign, Wu Zhao faced daunting cultural obstacles and fierce opposition. Acutely aware of the breadth of resistance to her public political engagement, Wu Zhao capably deflected much of the virulent criticism. This book examines how Wu Zhao overcame these ponderous obstacles to become the sole female emperor in China's long historical pageant by developing and embracing a lineage of culturally revered female ancestors, goddesses, and paragons from different traditions, all of whom were closely associated with her person and her political power. It explains how Wu Zhao, by endorsing these various cults and drawing upon each of the “three faiths” (san jiao)—Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism—significantly bolstered her political authority, providing both a divine aura and tremendous normative charisma. The book explores the timing, nature, and purpose of Wu Zhao's connections to this eclectic assemblage of past influential women and female divinities.