Intangible Culture ISSN:2799-3868(Print) 무형문화연구

This study addresses a fundamental paradox embedded in Buddhist ritual practice: how to render physically absent patriarchs present within the ritual space. Through a comparative analysis of patriarchal memorial rites across the Tiantai school, Chan Buddhism, and Korean Buddhism, this research explores the distinctive methodologies each tradition developed to overcome absence and actualize presence. The primary sources examined include Zunshi’s Memorial Ritual for Master Zhiyi of Tiantai (11th century), Dehui’s Chixiu Baizhang Qinggui (14th century), and two Korean texts from the Joseon period: Cheongmun (1529) and Jakbeop Gwigam (1826). The analysis proceeds along three dimensions—ritual structure, linguistic operation, and spatiotemporal configuration—with Maurice Halbwachs’s theory of collective memory serving as the interpretive framework. The findings reveal that Tiantai’s Twelve Prostrations reconstruct Master Zhiyi’s life as a twelve-stage narrative, ritualizing the ideal of yuandun (perfect and sudden enlightenment) through a structure of progressive re-experience. The practice of ritually revisiting specific sites of the patriarch’s cultivation functions as a social framework that transforms individual awakening into collective memory. In contrast, Chan’s “Bodhidharma Memorial” (Damo ji) achieves direct presence through teweitang—a tea offering specially prepared for the patriarch’s memorial day—maintaining extreme linguistic restraint while employing tea as a material medium. The ritual setting of banzhentang, in which patriarch and assembly share tea together, reflects Chan’s aspiration to realize the Way through ordinary, everyday acts. The Korean texts Cheongmun and Jakbeop Gwigam exhibit a pattern of integrating elements from both traditions. Cheongmun condenses Chinese ritual procedures into a single-day format while adopting direct tea offerings by the abbot and head monk. By the time of Jakbeop Gwigam, a fully articulated five-stage structure emerges—summoning, offering a seat, presenting offerings, proclamation, and sending off—accompanied by ritual language that juxtaposes “the lamp of the Buddha’s mind” with “the ocean of teachings.” What this study attempts to demonstrate is that differences in ritual form may be correlated with the soteriological orientations of each school. If Tiantai’s Twelve Prostrations pursue progressive re-experience through narrative structure, and Chan’s “Bodhidharma Memorial” seeks immediate presence through linguistic restraint, then Cheongmun and Jakbeop Gwigam reveal a process of reception and reconstruction that draws upon both approaches. Halbwachs’s theory of collective memory has proven to be an effective analytical framework for elucidating the social mechanisms by which ritual transforms individual practice into collective identity.