Totemic Mediation and Visual Prajñā: How Lotus and Dharma Wheel Motifs Generate Embodied Śūnyatā Experience in the Dunhuang Mogao Caves
Religions June 12, 2026 Peer reviewed DOI: 10.3390/rel17060707 via OpenAlex
Summary
Lotus and dharma wheel motifs in the Dunhuang Mogao Caves are shown to actively generate embodied religious experiences through a mechanism called 'totemic mediation.' This involves a triadic process of material-spatial arrangement, ontological transformation, and value structure generation. The analysis reveals that the lotus connects the worldly and divine, while the dharma wheel neutralizes linear time through its rotational dynamics, facilitating a direct understanding of emptiness. An analytic framework for studying such visual and ontological mediators is proposed.
Study at a glance
| Key finding | The lotus and dharma wheel motifs function as active visual apparatuses that create embodied religious experiences through totemic mediation. |
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Abstract
This article argues that lotus and dharma wheel motifs in the Dunhuang Mogao Caves function not merely as decorative symbols but as active visual apparatuses that generate embodied religious experience through a mechanism we term “totemic mediation.” Drawing on Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist reading of totemism, Descola’s ontological framework, Gell’s theory of art as agency, Meyer’s “sensational form,” and Varela’s neurophenomenology, we define totemic mediation as a triadic mechanism encompassing material–spatial arrangement, ontological transformation of experiential states, and value structure generation. We analyze motifs from Mogao Caves 285, 329, and 361 using a five-step analytic framework: formal–visual description, reconstructed embodied viewing, doctrinal identification, mediation mechanism analysis, and evaluative assessment. The analysis demonstrates that the lotus mediates ontologically along a spatial axis, building a vertical channel between the worldly and the divine through ceiling configurations and upward gazes, while the dharma wheel mediates teleologically across the temporal axis, neutralizing linear temporality through rotational dynamics. Together, these motifs constitute “visual prajñā”—a nonconceptual, embodied cognitive effect that bypasses discursive reasoning to enable direct apprehension of śūnyatā (emptiness). This article offers a replicable analytic framework for examining how religious images operate simultaneously as visual apparatuses and ontological mediators.