Page 118 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

It was probably in Gandhara, and under Western influence, that
the Buddha was first represented in sculpture. The style of Gan-
dhara is a curious mixture of the classical realism of Graeco-
Roman provincial art with the Indian genius, fostered at the
southern Kushan capital of Mathura, for giving concrete, plastic
expression to an abstract, metaphysical concept. From Gandhara,
Buddhism, and with it this new synthetic art, spread northward
across the Hindu Kush to central Asia, there to run like a powder
trail along the string of oases to the north and south of the Tarim
Basin.
122 Types of pagoda, i-j derived from
the Han timber ton: i Yunkang
.
(Northern Wei); 2. Sun (Tang):
3 Canton (Ming). 4 and 5 derived from
.
the Indian iikhara tower: 4 Sung-shan
(e, 520); 5. Sun (Tang)

BUDDHIST ART Buddhist sculpture preceded Buddhist architecture into China,
REACHES CHINA for it was the images—brought in the luggage of missionaries,
travellers, and pilgrims, who were no doubt prepared to swear
that what they carried was an exact replica ofsome famous icon in
India or central Asia—which were most deeply venerated. The
earliest known exactly dated Chinese Buddhist image, cast in 338,
is clearly an imitation of a Gandharan prototype. Such icons were
set up in shrines built in the traditional Chinese style, which grew
until the monastery or temple became a kind of palace, with
courtyards, pavilions, galleries, and gardens. No attempt was
made in these timber buildings to imitate the Indian temple. But
the stiipa presented a different kind of challenge. The monk Sung
Yun, returning from Gandhara early in the sixth century, had de-
scribed (as doubtless many before him) the gigantic stiipa erected
by King Kanishka, one of the wonders of the Buddhist world.
Built in timber, it was no less than seven hundred feet high, in thir-
teen storeys, capped by a mast with thirteen golden discs. The
Chinese already possessed, in the towers called lou and ch'iieh,
multistoreyed timber buildings which could be adapted to this
new purpose (see p. 82). The Chinese examples of this period have
all perished, but the pagodas at Horyuji and Yakushiji near Nara in
Japan still stand as monuments to this simple, graceful style. The
earliest surviving dateablc pagoda on Chinese soil, however, is the
twelve-sided stone tower on Mount Sung in Honan, erected in
about 520. It has no surviving Chinese antecedents. Its profile
123 Twelve-sided pagoda of Sung- echoes the curve of the Indian sikhara tower; the arched recesses on
vuch--.su on Mount Sung, Hotun.
Northern Wei Dynasty, about $20. the main faces recall the niches on the great stiipa at Bodhgaya,