Page 149 - China, 5000 years : innovation and transformation in the arts

scriptures, the breaking of the images, and the reality none other than the deified Laozi. Images of
confiscation of the property of the monasteries.
Moreover they have peeled off the gold from
the Buddhas and smashed the bronze and iron
Buddhas and measured their weight. What a pity!
What limit was there to the bronze, iron, and
gold Buddhas of the land? And yet, in
accordance with the Imperial edict, all have
been destroyed and have been turned into trash. 3
EVIDENCE OF EARLY BUDDHIST IMAGERY
IN CHINA
Tradition holds that the first Buddha image was
introduced into China sometime between 64 and
75 CE, as the result of a dream of Han Mingdi.The
emperor saw a divine man whose body was
golden in color, wearing a solar halo about the
crown of his head. He inquired of his courtiers,
whomone of said: "In the West there is a deity
known as the Buddha, whose form is like what
Your Majesty dreamed of; may it not have been
he?" Thereupon envoys were dispatched to
India, who had copies made of a Sutra
[scripture] and [obtained] an image, which they
displayed in China. There from the Son of
Heaven on down through the princes and
nobles, all paid them honor; for when they
heard that a man's soul is not extinguished by
death, there was none who was not fearful of
being lost. 4
This famous dream-and-envoy story was
considerably embellished over time. It occurred
initially in an early preface of the Sishi'er zhang jing Wecasting such icons. are informed by the noted
("The Scripture in Forty-Two Sections"), which
may be dated to the Eastern Han (25—220 ce) or
shortly thereafter. Such edifying anecdotes later
acquired an aura of fact, and were often cited as
literal truth by Chinese buddhologists.-s By the fifth
century the icon mentioned among the Buddhist
paraphernalia in the luggage of Mingdi's returning
delegation had been identified in Chinese records
either as the original or as a faithful, equally sacred
replica of the celebrated Sakyamuni portrait
commissioned by the youthful king Udayana,
Buddha's ardent admirer and pious patron. Although
this account of the legendary Udayana icon is
apocryphal, it tells us something about the
significance of imagery in the transmission of
Buddhism and the early Chinese concern and
respect for the foreign religion and its art.
A century after the purported introduction of the
hist Buddhist scripture and image, a lavish religious
ceremony in honor of Sakyamuni and ofLaozi, the
founding figure of Daoism, is mentioned by the
astrologer and scholar Xiang Kai in his well-known
memorial presented to the Han emperor Hiun in
r.66. His text refers to the beliefth.it Buddha was in
TRANSFIGURING DIVINITIES: BUDDHIST SCULPTURE IN CHINA
the two Sacred Ones were installed under
sumptuous floral canopies in a special palace
building. Rituals and sacrifices were performed with
pomp and ostentation, using precious vessels of gold
and silver, consecrated beads, and embroidered
6
textiles.
Fairly reliable information has been preserved
regarding the installation of yet another golden
Buddha image in what is now Jiangsu Province.
About the year 190, Zhai Rong, an active
propagandist for Buddhism, reportedly built a
structure of considerable size to house a gilded
bronze statue and to accommodate a large
congregation: "He erected a Buddha shrine, making
a human figure of bronze whose body he coated
with gold and clad in brocades. He hung up nine
tiers of bronze plates [on the spire] over a multi-
storied pavilion; his covered galleries could contain
three thousand men or more." 7
Buddhist icons must have been in ritual use in
China well before this date; they probably arrived in
the luggage of foreign merchants and missionaries
who had come along the ancient overland trade
routes of Central Asia or by sea around Southeast
Asia. Most of these images were probably made of
gilded bronze. Their shining surface was intended to
reproduce the sunlike radiance of the Buddha's
body. It is only toward the end of the Eastern Han
dynasty, about the year 200, that the Chinese
themselves may have started to experiment with
Vinaya master, translator, and biographer Daoxuan
(596—667) that a certain monk Huihu made a gilded
Sakyamuni image at the Shading Temple in Wujun
in the year 377. According to Daoxuan, the sixteen-
foot-high statue was cast in a cave dug on the steep
south side of the temple."
In general, bronze casters and sculptors enjoyed little
social eminence. Like their craftsmen ancestors, they
remained anonymous. Very few won recognition
comparable to that of contemporary painters. One
— —of the earliest sculptors perhaps the first whose
name entered historical records was Dai Kui (d.
395). He is said to have made monumental
configurations for various temples and to have
achieved an unprecedented technical versatility and
inventiveness, beauty and expressiveness 111 casting
bronze icons, carving wood sculptures, and making
portable lacquer statues. In Daoxuan's view, Dai
Kui's genius contributed decisively to the
progressive disuse of exotic foreign styles in t.ivor of
Sinicized Buddhist imagery;
mhi [Dai] Kui's opinion die images made
Middle Antiquity had almost all been rude and
oversimple, and in their function of inspiring
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