Page 124 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

1 28 The Wei Empress in procession
with court ladies. Restored stone relief The arrangement of the Pin-yang cave at Lungmcn was proba-
panel from Pin-yang-tu»g, Lungmcn.
bly intended to suggest the interior of a temple, whose equipment
Lite Northern Wei Dynasty.
would also have included free-standing images in stone, stone vo-
tive steles, and gilded bronze images. The steles were carved and
set up in the temple as an act of piety or gratitude by one or more
subscribers, whose names they often bore. They consisted either
of a flat slab shaped like a pippala leaf against which one or, more
often, a group of three figures stands out almost in the round; or
of a rectangular slab decorated, often on all four sides, with Bud-
dhas, bodhisattvas, and lesser deities, illustrations to favourite texts
such as the Lotus Sutra (Saddharmapundarika Sutra) and scenes from
the life of the Buddha carved in relief. Their peculiar interest and
value lie in the fact that they concentrate in little space the essen-
tials of the style and iconography of the period, and that they are
frequently dated.
In Cave 133 at Mai-chi-shan, a group of eighteen of these steles
still stand in their original positions against the walls, where they
were set up by pious devotees. Three of these are splendid exam-
ples of the mid-sixth-ccntury style; one a veritable "poor man's
bible." The upper central panel is devoted to the incident in the
Lotus Sutra in which Sakyamuni by the power of his preaching
causes Prabhutaratna, a Buddha of the distant past, to appear be-
side him. In the centre and below arc Buddhas flanked by bodhisatt-
vas—a simple presentation of the paradise theme. The side panels
show (on the left, going downward) Sakyamuni descending from
the Tusita heaven where he had preached to his deceased mother;
Sakyamuni as a young prince; the renunciation; and the first