Page 48 - China, 5000 years : innovation and transformation in the arts

where the emperor would come in person to
scatter flowers on them as part of the Great
Blessing ceremony.
Both Confucians and Daoists denounced many
Buddhist ideas and practices as immoral or unsuited
to China. For instance, they portrayed the great
sums spent on construction of temples, statues, and
ceremonies as a drain on the economy that
impoverished the people and thus indirectly the
state. At the same time, they borrowed extensively
from the repertoire of ideas and practices that
Buddhists had introduced into China, including the
use of images on altars. Probably the adoption of
icons should be attributed to their visual
effectiveness. Icons work differently from words and
texts, because images of the human form are potent
in arousing emotions. Moreover, the meanings they
can convey are not fixed, but mediated by the
—response of the viewer different people can give
—an image different meanings at different times an
attribute that makes images good objects for
meditation.
Although most of the icons that survive from Tang
and Song times are of Buddhist divinities, not local
or Daoist gods, ancestors, or Confucian sages, there
is abundant textual evidence that by Tang and Song
times temples of all sorts represented their central
objects of worship with images. These statues and
paintings must have constituted a large share of the
art that the average person had occasion to see.
Temples to Confucius and to Confucian sages and
teachers regularly had statues in them. The imperial
ancestral cult was expanded to accommodate halls
with statues of emperors. And Buddhist monasteries
added halls with images of their former abbots,
treating them as ancestors. 15
DIVERSITY AND CREATIVITY: THE CASE
OF THE SONG DYNASTY
I have already suggested some of the ways the
diverse ideas sketched here were linked to the
equally diverse objects we now view as China's art
treasures. The best way to extend my analysis of the
ways creativity played out in a cultural context that
encompassed the coexistence of numerous
unintegrated ideas is to look at the conjunction of
such ideas in a single time period. The Song
dynasty (960—1279) offers a good case.
The Song was without doubt a time when new
ideas and practices appeared in profusion. Science
and technology were making rapid progress, with
advances in abstract disciplines like mathematics
and in such practical matters as the technology of
Newiron and steel, ceramics, ballistics, and textiles. pursuits in and of themselves, even if they did not
gods appeared, and existing cults spread. In
Buddhism, Tiantai teachings underwent a revival. In
Daoism, Celestial Heart and Thunder Rates
THE INTELLECTUAL AND RELIGIOUS CONTEXT OF CHINESE ART
teachings gained prominence. Among Confucians,
polymaths like Shen Gua (1031-1095) contributed
to everything from mathematics to geography,
archaeology, music, printing, medicine, divination,
military strategy, and agricultural technology. Other
Confucian scholars like Cheng Yi (1033— 1107) were
drawn to metaphysical speculation about the nature
and workings of the cosmos. 16
Certain trends and issues crosscut many traditions.
For instance, concern both with texts and with
what cannot be conveyed in texts enlivened
intellectual life in many circles. Many highly
educated Confucian scholars were attracted to
forms of spirituality that did not rely on texts,
including meditation and visionary experiences,
and they were ready to make use of Buddhist and
Daoist traditions toward these ends.' 7 At a less
elevated level, many literati were captivated by cases
of spirit-writing, in which spirits created texts by
possessing objects or people. Zhu Xi (1130— 1200),
the towering figure in Confucianism, took a strong
line against Buddhist and Daoist practices,
advocating the "investigation of things" through
careful reading of the Four Books and the classics
more generally; he also, however, advocated "quiet
sitting," a form of meditation. In a comparable way,
Chan Buddhism, notwithstanding its emphasis on
transmission outside texts, was expanded to
accommodate highly literate Chan monks who
excelled in poetry and other literary arts. The
impact of this lively interest both in words and in
what goes beyond words is evident in Chan
painting, which seems to extend the idea of
communicating through nondiscursive means to
painting that is suggestive much more than
descriptive.
I would also argue that the fundamental conflict
between the claims of rulers and of the educated to
moral authority helped rather than hindered artistic
creativity. The Song was a time when the moral
autonomy of those with Confucian educations was
strongly reasserted and became a matter of political
struggle between the court and the Confucian
literati. The size of the educated class grew so large
in Song times that there was always a large supply
of highly educated men who could not find
employment in government service, but this did
not make them more subservient to the court. To
the contrary, literati residing in their home
communities found a variety of ways to assert their
moral autonomy. For instance, they frequently
erected shrines to honor scholar-heroes of the past
who had been persecuted or unfairly neglected.
Leading literati like Su Shi (1037— 1101), who took
an interest in painting, calligraphy, and poetry
writing, helped validate aesthetic and scholarly
lead to serving the ruler. Others, like Cheng Yi and
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