Page 47 - China, 5000 years : innovation and transformation in the arts

masters tried to get their followers to free their
minds from the traps of discursive thought by
taking language to the limits. They would assign
them baffling anecdotes or questions to ponder and
respond to their efforts with cryptic utterances,
shouts, or even blows.
Tension between the world of the book and the
world that cannot be contained by the book cut
across many different traditions. In China, as
elsewhere, people felt a strong urge to impose order
on experience by specifying, categorizing,
evaluating, and judging via words and their
inscription in texts, but their attempts could never
totally succeed because of all that could not be
contained by texts, the disrupting forces and
uncontrollable potency of rulers, mountains,
divinities, oral revelations, dreams, emotions, and so
on. The Confucian literati normally took their
stand on the side of texts and order, but the
distinction here goes beyond simple divisions of
literati versus rulers, or Confucians versus Buddhists
and Daoists. Buddhists, Daoists, and rulers all drew
on texts and their ordering potential, and
Confucian scholars to varying degrees drew on the
magical power of rituals and the visual and
emotional power of images, not to mention
retreating to mountains or practicing meditative
techniques that could lead to insights without use
of books.
The art of calligraphy, paradoxically perhaps, drew
from both the reverence for writing and the deep
belief in powers and forces that cannot be fully
conveyed in words. Examples of writing were
thought to reflect the writer's character and
feelings, not just the thoughts he was trying to
convey. The strength, balance, and flow ot the
strokes were believed to convey the calligrapher's
moral and psychological make-up as well as his
momentary emotions. The flow of energy within
the person was found manifest in the movement of
his hand and brush and the resulting traces of ink.
ICONS
The ideas discussed so far are indigenous ideas,
developed in the huge subcontinent we loosely
label China. But some key elements in Chinese
religious traditions entered from outside,
particularly as part of or in the company of
Buddhism, and these elements also provided part of
the context of Chinese art.
Representations of human beings appear
occasionally in early Chinese art. Some Neolithic
pots have human faces depicted on them (cat. 114),
as do a few Shang-period bronzes; some late Zhou
bronzes are decorated with small images of human
beings engaged in warfare, hunting, rituals, or
agriculture; sometimes the base of a lamp or tray
THE INTEUECTUAt AND RELIGIOUS CONTEXT OF CHINESE ART
was made in the form of a human servant (cat. 47).
From the Han period there are many portrayals of
human figures on the walls of temples or tombs;
some of these appear to be generic figures, others
are labeled as specific figures from history or
mythology (cats. 103, 104).
There is little evidence, however, that these
depictions of human beings were idols or icons,
made to represent gods or spirits during sacrifices
or other rituals. Pre-Buddhist Chinese shrines were
not centered on statues or paintings of deities.
Chinese sacrificial ceremonies could be performed
either in the open, with a temporary altar, or in
temples, but in either case objects other than
paintings or statues were used to represent the
spirits or gods. The central object for the she
sacrifices to the earth, for instance, was a small
earthen mound; for sacrifices to ancestral spirits, a
tablet inscribed with the name of the dead was
sufficient.
With the introduction of Buddhism, however, the
use of images to depict divinities and spirits
expanded radically (see essays by Helmut Brinker
and Su Bai in this volume). Buddhists used images
both to teach Buddhist doctrine and to provide a
focus for devotional activities. Within a few
centuries of the introduction of Buddhism, not
only did the altars in Buddhist temples house
images of Buddhas and bodhisattvas, but Daoist and
folk temples held images of their gods, and ancestral
temples also often came to contain images of the
ancestors.
The reverencing of icons was not a practice that
the historical Buddha Sakyamuni taught his
disciples in India. But by the time Buddhism
arrived in China as a religion of foreign merchants
and missionaries, the use of icons was well
established. The Scripture on the Production of Budtllui
Images (Ztiofo xingxiangjing), one of the earliest
sutras translated into Chinese, records the
conversation between the Buddha and King
Udayana concerning the rewards received in later
lives by those who produce images ot the
Buddha. u Even the most eminent monks taught
followers devotional practices centered on images.
The learned monk and translator Daoan (312 (85
would set up a holy image and light incense
whenever he gave a lecture. The equally eminent
monk Huiyuan (334-417) in 402 assembled .1 group
of monks and lay people in front of .111 image ot
the Pure Land, the Western Paradise of the Buddha
Amitabha. With such prompting, the production ol
Buddhist images expanded gready. IK S-a.
according to one observer, there were over .1
thousand Buddhist statues in the city ofl uoyang.
Each year, on die seventh da) of the fourth month,
all these were brought to the [ingming Temple.
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