Examples of Buddho–Daoist interaction: conceptions of the afterlife in early medieval epigraphic sources

Abstract

This paper is based on a larger study of conceptions of the afterlife in the engraved texts of 496 entombed epigraphs (muzhi 墓誌) and 494 votive stele inscriptions (zaoxiangji 造像記) from northern China from the fifth and sixth century CE, using the database of Wei Jin Nanbeichao Stone inscriptions 魏晉南北朝石刻語料庫, part of the larger database of excavated documents from the Wei Jin Nanbeichao 魏晉南北朝實物語料庫 at the Center for the Study and Application of Chinese Characters at ECNU Shanghai.