Page 146 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

THE HORYUJI No major works survive in China itself to demonstrate that fusion
KONDO CYCLE of Indian formal ideals with the traditional Chinese language of
the brush which took place in the T'ang Dynasty, and which we
have already referred to in sculpture as the "fourth phase." But
such a great synthesis did take place, and was in turn passed on to
Korea and Japan. About the beginning of the eighth century, the
walls of the Kondo of Horyuji Temple, Nara, were decorated
with four large, square panels depicting the paradises of the Bud-
dhas of the four directions, and eight vertical panels with bodhisatt-
vas. These paintings, after miraculously surviving for twelve
hundred years, were almost totally destroyed by fire in 1949, a dis-
aster to the art world as great as if the frescoes in the Sistine Chapel
or those in the cave temples of Ajanta had perished. A part of the
most popular paradise—that of Amitabha—is illustrated here.
The composition is a simple and serene arrangement of deities, the
bodhisattvas Mahasthamaprapta and Avalokitesvara standing on
either side of Amitabha, who sits turning the wheel of the law on
his lotus throne beneath a bejewelled canopy. The figures arc
drawn with a sweeping brush-line of extraordinary delicacy and
precision which evokes a feeling of the solid form, from which the
Indian tactile sensuality has been abstracted. Indeed, except for the
iconography and the contours themselves there is little here that is
Indian. Arbitrary shading is used with great restraint to amplify
the roundness of an arm or chin, but much more is accomplished
by the almost imperceptible modulations of the brush-line itself,
while the folds of the drapery are emphasised by a kind of shading
i $6 The paradise ofA mitabha. Detail
of] wall painting in the Kondo (Image which—if the Admonitions scroll is a faithful copy of the style of
Hall) of Horyuji, Nara. Japan- Eirly
eighth century.

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