Page 127 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

I J} Minor deities and worshippers.
Fragment of a stone relief from Wan-fo-
ssu, Ch'iung-lai, Szechwan. Sixth to
early seventh century.

Dvaravati kingdom of Thailand and with figures and reliefs ex-
cavated at Dong-duong and other sites in the ancient kingdom of
Champa (Vietnam). Nothing comparable to the Ch'iung-lai find
has yet been unearthed at Nanking itself, where the destruction of
early Buddhist monuments was almost complete; but there is no
doubt that the Buddhist art of Szechwan at this time was strongly
influenced by artistic developments at the southern capital.
As with sculpture, so did the introduction of Buddhism give birth BUDDHIST PAINTING
to a new school of painting of which both the content and the
forms were largely foreign. A Sung writer tells of a certain K'ang
Seng-hui, a Sogdian, who in a.d. 247 came to the Wu kingdom
(Nanking) by way of Indochina "to install icons and practise rit-
ual circumambulation. It so happened that Ts'ao Pu-hsing saw his
iconographic cartoons for Buddhas [in the style of] the Western
Regions, and copied them; whence it came about that the Ts'ao
[style] has been popular through the generations all over the
world." (By the end of the sixth century, however, nothing sur-
vived of Ts'ao's work "except the head of one dragon in the Privy
Pavilion.") The new style culminated in the work of Chang Seng-
yu, the greatest of the painters working for the Liang emperors at
Nanking. His work was remarkable—according to contempo-
rary accounts—for its realism; he painted dragons on the wall of
An-lo-ssu, and when, in spite of his warning, he was persuaded to
paint in their eyes, they flew away amid thunder and lightning. He
decorated many Buddhist and Taoist temples in Nanking with
frescoes; he was a portraitist and also executed long scrolls illus-
trating such homelier themes as "Han Wu Ti Shooting the
Dragon," the "Drunken Monk," and "Children Dancing at a
Farmhouse"; but all were lost centuries ago, and none of the later
pictures claiming to be copies of his work, such as the "Five
Planets and Twenty-four Constellations" in the Abe Collection in
Osaka, gives more than a hint of his style. Nevertheless, we may