Organizer: Dorothy C. Wong, Florida State University Chair: Robert Linrothe, Skidmore College Discussant: Harry Vanderstappen, University of Chicago
This panel investigates the issue of self-representation of patrons in Chinese Buddhist art. Following the practice in India, Chinese patrons of Buddhist imagery also made their presence felt by representation in images or identification in names. Such visual and inscriptional information on Chinese Buddhist patronage offer windows to interpret a variety of issues. By accounting for where these images of donors are found in relationship to the icons, their scale, attitude, costume, framing devices, the relations among groups of donors, the calligraphic labels, and the content of inscriptions, we can identify certain attitudes toward Buddhist imagery as well as control over the content.
The four papers cover topics from the fifth through the fifteenth century, investigating both imperial and non-imperial Chinese Buddhist patronage. Retrieving information from a corpus of Buddhist steles, Dorothy Wong discusses the phenomenon of yiyi devotional societies during the Northern Dynasties, and the social and political implications in the popular support of Buddhism. Amy McNair focuses on the notion of reading the colossal image of Buddha Vairocana at Fengxiansi as a portrait of Empress Wu. She examines what various scholars have thought the empress' involvement in the patronage of the cave-temple was and presents a close reading of the c. 723 inscription on the base of the Vairocana figure. Robert Linrothe investigates a striking instance of a Tangut emperor inserting himself into narrative and mandala representations at the Yulin cave-temples in Gansu, and explores the imperial patron's personal and political intent. Patricia Berger examines a recently rediscovered scroll painting commissioned by the Yongle emperor of the Ming dynasty to commemorate a Tibetan lama's performance of ceremonial rites for the emperor's deceased parents. Mixing Chinese and Tibetan traditions in iconography and style, the painting also underscores the religious and political ambitions of both the Chinese emperor and the Tibetan lama.
Yiyi Buddhist Devotional Societies of the Northern Dynasties
Dorothy C. Wong, Florida State University
Inscriptional and visual information document the emergence of Buddhist devotional societies called yi or yiyi at the end of the fifth century, during the latter part of the Northern Wei dynasty. Such devotional societies drew members from small villages and towns covering wide geographical areas in northern China, representing a broad cross-section of the society. These groups became major patrons of Buddhism in the sixth century, alongside the aristocracy and the clergy, testifying to the spread of Buddhism to the popular level in the north.
This significant change in Chinese Buddhist patronage coincided with two other major developments that also occurred during the Northern Wei period: the establishment of the Buddhist church as a centralized state institution, and the resurgence of the use of Buddhist steles. Adapted from traditional Chinese tablets (bei) for Buddhist imagery, Buddhist steles were primarily dedicated by devotional societies. Erected in public spaces, such stones served as the focal point of communal worship and ritual activities. Donative inscriptions record the occasion and the reasons for the dedication. Names and images of donors not only commemorate the devotional society's collective identity, they also indicate the structure and hierarchy within the religious organization, and the members' social and ethnic background.
Focusing on late fifth- to sixth-century Buddhist steles, this paper examines these yiyi devotional societies and explores the roles played by Buddhism and Buddhist art in the ethnically and culturally mixed society of the Northern Dynasties.
Reading Portraiture onto Patronage: Empress Wu and the Context of
Self-Representation at Longmen
Amy McNair, University of Kansas
A notable phenomenon in East Asian history is the popular reading of certain famous statues of Buddhist deities as portraits of rulers who patronized Buddhism. For example, the Yumedono Kannon was believed to be a portrait of Prince Shotoku (572-622), the man who established Buddhism in Japan. The instance of this phenomenon that I will examine in this paper is the popular notion that the colossal Vairocana figure in the Fengxiangsi Shrine at the Buddhist cave-shrine site of Longmen (near Luoyang, Henan) is a portrait of Empress Wu (624-705), whose generous support of the Buddhist church mixed politics and piety. To argue that this idea is an anachronistic projection backward of the megalomania the Empress evinced only after her husband's death in 683, I will examine the political situation ca. 670-675, when the shrine was created, and the contents of the inscription on the statue's base, dated to ca. 723. Further, I will survey the larger context of self-representation in votive donations at Longmen during the Tang Dynasty and how Empress Wu's patronage fits into traditions of patronage by and for women and the imperial household.
The Patron's Place: Imperial Tangut Painting at Yulin
Robert Linrothe, Skidmore College
The painted caves at Yulin preserve late twelfth-century paintings from the Tangut Xia period. Cave 3 is one of the most interesting of these, since it synthesizes iconic imagery of Buddhas, bodhisattvas and stupas with narratives and mandalas. Chinese and Himalayan style narratives and mandalas coexist, and in both types of imagery one finds images of the patron, in this case a presumptive Tangut emperor.
Typically, patrons in Chinese Buddhist imagery are shown either at the entrance to or below the sacred imagery. Only rarely is the patron inside the space dominated by the Buddhist deity, and if so, the former is set off from the latter by significant disjunctions of scale. In the case of Cave 3 at Yulin, however. the patron stands at the foot of reclining Buddha, depicted as one of the idealized kings who were Shakyamuni's contemporaries.
Even more unusual is the penetration of the patron into the sacred enclosure of a mandala. One of the mandalas of Cave 3 is that of Ushnishavijaya, whose cult flourished under the Tangut empire. The Tangut emperor, the primary promulgator of the Ushnishavijaya cult, has been depicted within the mandala, offering reverence to the deity. A mandala is a rigidly organized, hieratic and absolutely symmetrical system, with little tolerance for preferential inclusion. By shattering that symmetry, the patron's image plays a dual role: as a kind of deified attendant who honors the deity, and as the initiated mediator, the source from which emanates the mandala visualization.
These images of the Tangut imperial patron extend the contexts in which East Asian imperial patrons have explicitly placed themselves, and suggest both deep personal as well as political motivations.
Miracles in Nanjing: An Imperial Record of the Fifth Karmapa's Visit to the
Chinese Capital
Patricia Berger, University of California, Berkeley
In 1406, a powerful Tibetan lama, the Fifth Karmapa (Dezhin Shekpa), arrived at the court of the Ming Yongle emperor to perform rites in honor of the emperor's deceased parents, Zhu Yuanzhang and Empress Ma. During the course of the 14-day ceremonies at Nanjing's Linggu Monastery, and later at Mt. Wutai, the sky was filled with miraculous sights-multicolored rays of light, evanescent images of the Buddha, companies of luohans, and flights of cranes. All of these miracles were recorded in a handscroll painted by order of the Yongle emperor and later given to the Karmapa as a remembrance of his visit, during which he was also named Dabao Fawang (Great Precious Dharma King). Each day of Karmapa's Nanjing sojourn was also described in detailed, multilingual inscriptions on the painting, written in Chinese, Tibetan, Mongolian, Arabic, and Uighur. The scroll has long been kept at the Karmapa's seat, the Tsurphu Monastery. Believed lost during the Cultural Revolution, it resurfaced in Beijing in an exhibition of Sino-Tibetan art held at the Gugong in 1992.
In the Tsurphu scroll, Chinese political motives are couched in imagery that is tinged with Tibetan magic, but still firmly grounded in earlier Chinese court traditions, Confucian and Daoist, of iconography and style. Using most native traditions, the scroll nonetheless establishes the profound charisma of the Tibetan Karmapa, and reveals the Yongle emperor's parents as bodhisattvas and chakravartins, all the while hinting at the same status for the emperor himself. It is a masterful example of religious-political propaganda, where the utopian ideals of Tibetan Buddhism are presented in a visual idiom that is basically Chinese, and designed to serve practical ends.