The hope for rebirth in paradises became a powerful goal for many Chinese Buddhists in the sixth century. The practice of visualization, a meditative method to attain such rebirth, became increasingly popular as did artistic representations of Buddhist paradises. The growing interest in these paradises corresponded with the development of three-dimensional, illusionistic representation in Chinese pictorial art.; At the Mogao complex near Dunhuang in northwest China there is a continuous visual record of Buddhist cave-temple decoration spanning the fifth through the thirteenth centuries. This dissertation explores and documents the complex relationships among figural, architectural, and landscape elements that together produce convincing three-dimensional, spatial representations. I propose that this development of illusionism in painting at Dunhuang was closely linked to the Buddhist meditative practice of visualization in which the practitioner mentally constructed an eidetic image of a specific object or scene.; The pure land paintings at Dunhuang are also related to sutras that both describe the wonders of paradisiacal worlds and prescribe visualization practices. The changing conventions of these practices can be seen in concrete form in the paradise programs of the Sui and Early Tang cave-temples at Dunhuang. The rapid development of pictorial skills necessary to depict a spatial environment reflects an intention to present these paradises as both enticing and attainable as well as a significant alteration in the way visual perception was represented.
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