Page 36 - Chinese Decorative Arts: The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, v. 55, no. 1 (Summer, 1997)

sixteen lohans was expanded to a group of mountain covered with a few scraggly pines. And the kalpa of the sages settles along the
by
eighteen, and the tenth century it had grown The men hold rosaries and each is accompa- Ganges
a
to five hundred. nied by youthful attendant. The malachite The free moon is my light and glory
A flower made rich silks
The development of an iconic type lohan, sage is the more elaborate of the two. He is simple by
of
I have none that I desire
an unprepossessing individual in an indeter- shown seated on a woven mat, and his sandals
Content I sit on the high snowy peak.
minate setting, is often linked to the work of have been placed beneath the ledge under it.
the monk Guanxiu (832-912), whose paintings Both men have extremely long eyebrows, a Unfortunately, Yeguang does not appear in
of these figures have long served as archetypes characteristic frequently associated with standard Buddhist dictionaries or in indices to
in East Asian art. By the eleventh century the Pindola Bharadvaja, one of the original six- the Taisho-period Tripitaka (the Chinese ver-
in
repertory had expanded to include lohans in teen lohans, who became the focus of private sion of the Buddhist canon reprinted Japan
landscapes and courtly settings with elaborate devotion in China and is often worshiped as during the early twentieth century) that is the
compositions that included five hundred figures. the patron of Buddhist refectories. primary source for Chinese and Japanese texts.
The sages became a major theme in Chinese A poem written by the Qianlong emperor (This volume and a comparable Tibetan ver-
to
literati painting during the late-Ming- early- and inscribed in gold on the malachite sculpture sion are the two main sources for Buddhist
Qing-period revival of Buddhism. Many by his eleventh son, Yong Xing (I752-I823), texts that have been preserved.) While it seems
of
paintings lohans, as well as contemporaneous begins with an identification of the lohan as likely that Yeguang is a variant name for one
images in the decorative arts such as these two Yeguang and then follows: of the five hundred lohans, it is not impossible
sculptures, stress their eremitic nature by plac- Several thousand years passed while facing that both the malachite and the lapis-lazuli
ing them in caves and other remote locations. the wall sculptures refer to a nameless individual noted
Both of these works depict a lohan seated Mount Sumeru is like a Kshana in the late Qing period as an exemplar of
in a grotto, situated in an inaccessible, rocky True void comes to the ocean of life Buddhist practice and virtues. DPL

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