Rock, Paper, Scissors: Durable Ephemera and Networks of Stone in Quanzhou’s Zhenguo Pagoda
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Building a pagoda mobilizes durable materials into architectonic form. But a pagoda may also incorporate likenesses of images and objects wrought in ephemeral materials, thus becoming a nexus of textual, pictorial, and formal transfer and intermedial preservation. This essay examines how, in the Zhenguo pagoda 鎮國塔 (lit. “Defender of the State Pagoda”) at the Kaiyuan temple in Quanzhou, Fujian, rock—covered with the imagery of paper (and other fugitive media) by means of scissors (or, more precisely, the carver’s knife)—preserved traces of evanescent forms. Specifically, it: articulates the relationship of paper-based editions of the Buddhist canon to the pagoda’s stone-carved narrative program; asserts the influence of logographic schema of printed-paper primers and locally known, silk-based court painting styles to the pagoda’s imagery; and contends that carved images of small, free-standing bronze (and stone) pagodas link the Zhenguo pagoda to overlapping local (Quanzhou), regional (Min-Yue/Fujian), imperial (Song-dynasty), and maritime (Indian Ocean) object networks. To test the hypothesis that the Zhenguo pagoda serves as a repository of, and lexicon for, now lost forms, this essay concludes by using the imagery of the Zhenguo pagoda to recover the iconography of a type of Quanzhou-specific Buddhist monument, the Stone Shoot (Shisun 石筍).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".