Page 147 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

1 57 The young Sakyarnuni cuts off his
hair. Landscape in the painterly style.
Detail ofa banner painting. Ink and
colour on silk. From Tunhuang. T'ang
Dynasty.

Ku K'ai-chih — goes back to the fifth century. Only in the jewel-
lery is there a hint of that rich impasto with which the Yii-ch'ih
had astonished Ch'ang-an. Apart from these details, the forms, as
Tung Yu said of Wu Tao-tzu, "seem to have come spontaneously,
yet inevitably."
Long after the cult of Amitabha had declined in metropolitan TUNHUANG
China, it lived on in the hearts of the pilgrims and country folk at
Tunhuang, who must have gazed with awe and wonder at the
huge heavenly visions that filled the walls of the seventh- and
eighth-century caves. In a walled-up storeroom at Tunhuang, Sir
Aurel Stein found a great hoard of manuscripts and silk banners.
Many were craftsman s work, but, taken as a whole, they repre-
sent the only considerable group of undoubtedly genuine Chinese
silk paintings from the T'ang Dynasty that have survived. The
most remarkable is a banner on which arc very carefully drawn a
series of Buddha figures almost certainly copied from sketches of
well-known Indian images made on the spot. One represents the
Buddha of the enlightenment at Bodhgaya, two are faithful repro-
ductions of Gandharan models, another shows the Buddha
preaching on the Vulture Peak, while Stein identified yet another