social histories of buddhist art in medieval china

9

REVIEW ESSAYS

Social Histories of Buddhist Art in Medieval China

ORDINARY IMAGES

By Stanley K. AbeChicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002Pp. xxv

+

373. $75.00, ISBN 978-0-226-00044-2.

THE IMPACT OF BUDDHISM ON CHINESE MATERIAL CULTURE

By John KieschnickPrinceton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003Pp. viii

+

343. Cloth, $75.00, ISBN 978-0-691-09675-9; paper, $29.95, ISBN 978-0-691-09676-6.

PERFORMING THE VISUAL: THE PRACTICE OF BUDDHIST WALL PAINTING IN CHINA AND CENTRAL ASIA, 618-960

By Sarah E. FraserStanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004Pp. xvi

+

342. $70.00, ISBN 978-0-804745331.

ART, RELIGION, AND POLITICS IN MEDIEVAL CHINA: THE DUNHUANG CAVE OF THE ZHAI FAMILY

By Ning QiangHonolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004Pp. xv

+

178. $39.00, ISBN 978-0-8248-2703-8.

CHINESE STELES: PRE-BUDDHIST AND BUDDHIST USE OF A SYMBOLIC FORM

By Dorothy C. WongHonolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004Pp. xviii

+

226. $50.00, ISBN 978-0-8248-2783-0.

SHAPING THE LOTUS SUTRA: BUDDHIST VISUAL CULTURE IN MEDIEVAL CHINA

By Eugene Y. WangSeattle: University of Washington Press, 2005Pp. xxiv

+

487. Cloth, $75.00, ISBN 978-0-295-98462-9; paper $60.00, ISBN 978-0-295-98685-2.

REVIEWER

: Kate A. LingleyUniversity of Hawai’i at ManoaHonolulu, HI 96822

The six books reviewed here represent a wave of publica-tions on the history of Chinese Buddhist art since the year2000. For the most part, this work has focused on the medi-

eval period, from the Northern and Southern Dynastiesthrough the Tang dynasty (roughly speaking, from thebeginning of the fourth century CE to the beginning ofthe tenth). These books are part of a surge in interest in thehistory and culture of medieval China since about 1990.They also reflect a simultaneous trend in the study of Chi-nese Buddhist art that seeks to move away from questionsof Buddhist doctrine and philosophy, and to focus instead onpopular religious practice, the function of religious artworks,and the social history of religion. This trend parallels therecent increased interest in popular or folk religion in thestudy of Chinese religions, and it reflects some of the sameconcerns: specifically, the need to reexamine a wide rangeof historical (and contemporary) Chinese experience thathad previously been dismissed as superstition, heterodoxy,or worse (Teiser 1996, 25). The primary concerns of thesesix books are not, for the most part, based on questions ofwhich school of Buddhist thought is reflected in the imagesand sites they study, nor of which texts provide the sourcefor their iconographic programs. Rather, such questions areused to support larger investigations into religious and artis-tic practices, social life, ethnic identity, political trends, andeveryday life in general.

All six authors represented here received their doctoraldegrees in the 1990s, and all except Kieschnick receivedthem in art history. Kieschnick is the one author who istrained in religious studies, and as such, his approach to hismaterial is slightly different, although this by no meansdiminishes the tremendous usefulness of his book for arthistorians. Although his book is not the earliest of the six tobe published, its origins in the scholarship on Buddhist stud-ies and its panoramic scope make it a natural place to begin.

Kieschnick’s book,

The Impact of Buddhism on ChineseMaterial Culture

, attempts to account for the ways in whichthe introduction and subsequent domestication of Buddhismin China altered and influenced China’s material culture. Indoing so, Kieschnick’s main sources are historical texts andinscriptions that describe new types of objects and ideasabout objects brought into China with Buddhism. The objectsthemselves play a secondary, illustrative role. This is not, inthe strictest sense, an art-historical approach to the problem,but it enables the author to produce a far more comprehen-sive account of the impact of Buddhism on Chinese materialculture than would be possible through a closer reliance on

Religious Studies Review

• VOLUME 33 • NUMBER 1 • JANUARY 2007

10

the material record, not least because this approach allowsKieschnick to write about object types that rarely survive tothe present day, such as monastic robes, alms bowls, rosa-ries, and books. It also allows him to engage with a questionthat is rarely taken up by art historians: the status of mate-rial culture in a religious system that ultimately rejects notonly the value, but even the objective existence of the mate-rial world.

The book is organized not by object type but in terms ofmajor ideas associated with objects in medieval ChineseBuddhism: sacred power, symbolism, and merit, with afourth section devoted to incidental introductions such assugar and tea. In general, Kieschnick does not focus on themore technical aspects of objects such as techniques andcontexts of manufacture, stylistic change, and sources ofmaterial, except where they are relevant to contemporaryideas about objects, such as the ethical debate over whetheror not monks were permitted to wear silk (98-100). Rather,he is primarily interested in the introduction of these objectsto China, the uses to which they are put, and the significancethat is ascribed to them. Thus, his section on the alms bowldoes not incorporate a survey of bowls and their uses in pre-Buddhist China, as an art historian might do. The alms bowlas a type of vessel is particular to Buddhism, but what isparticular about it is its identity, its meaning, rather thanits physical or material difference from ordinary bowls—although some materials were clearly considered moreappropriate than others for this use (108). More important,its introduction does not seem to have altered the way peopleused ordinary bowls; it is therefore rightly treated as a sep-arate phenomenon.

Although the majority of Kieschnick’s sources are tex-tual, he is ultimately an advocate for the incorporation ofmaterial culture studies into the study of religion. “Materialculture is as much a part of religion as language, thought, orritual,” he writes. “Hence, unless we appreciate the place ofmaterial culture in Chinese Buddhist history, our picture ofthis history remains skewed and incomplete” (23). The orga-nization of his book in terms of major concepts is no doubtaimed at this goal, as it identifies the function and meaningof particular objects with some of the central ideas of Chi-nese Buddhism. For art historians, the great usefulness ofthis book comes in the breadth of textual sources Kieschnickhas mustered to his task. Sinologists of all disciplines sufferfrom an embarrassment of riches when it comes to textualsources, and art historians of China face a particular chal-lenge in mastering both an immense body of literature andan enormous body of visual material. In the case of Buddhistart history, we owe a tremendous debt to our colleagues inBuddhist studies for books such as Kieschnick’s, whichpresent a wide range of material organized in the context ofcontemporary debates in the field.

Abe’s 2002 book,

Ordinary Images

, is the first sally inthe ongoing conversation represented by the five art histor-ical books reviewed here. Abe’s book articulates andexplores many of the concerns that ultimately lie behind thecurrent shift in Chinese Buddhist art history toward thesocial history of art. It has inspired a great deal of discussionamong art historians, not least because it proposes a meth-odological shift that alters the boundaries of social-historicalinquiry into Buddhist art of the medieval period.

The central problem that motivates Abe’s book is theproblem of “ordinary people,” that is, patrons and believersabout whom little or nothing is known beyond the fact thattheir names appear inscribed in the surface of Buddhistmonuments of various types. Historically, the limits of inves-tigation into the social contexts of these monuments weretextual: if the patrons whose names were attached to a givenmonument could be identified in the historical or Buddho-logical (but mainly historical) record, then their lives, iden-tities, and aims could be investigated. If not, then theartwork in question was considered of no interest to such aninquiry. There were two major drawbacks to this approach.First, the vast number of patrons whose names we findattached to Buddhist monuments do not appear in the his-torical record, so that in practice, very few artworks wereunderstood to be available for social-historical study. Thefew that were mentioned gained disproportionate impor-tance and were studied at great length, while others wereignored except as examples of period or regional style oriconography. The second problem was that the Chinese his-torical record, which is famous for its omissions when itcomes to Buddhism, became the effective arbiter of signifi-cance for the history of Buddhist art. As most historicalwriting in China was primarily concerned with the activitiesof the imperial court, the upper aristocracy, and high-levelmilitary and civil officials, this meant that only members ofthese groups were known as Buddhist art patrons. Yet theenormous body of surviving Buddhist art cannot be tied tothe court or the aristocracy, which implies that the majorityof patronage was carried out at other levels of society. Inparticular, it implies that the norms of Buddhist image mak-ing were in fact defined by the kinds of images and monu-ments that the traditional approach ignored. Abe’s project isto investigate these neglected materials, which he termsordinary images.

The images Abe investigates range relatively widely intype, medium, style, and context, but all are related to theearliest development of Buddhist art in China. The body ofthe book consists of four chapters. The first considers theearliest known Buddha images made in China, dating fromthe late Eastern Han period and just after (late second andearly third century CE). These include relief images intombs, “money trees,” bronze mirrors, and the sculptural

11



funerary jars known as

hunping

. The second chapter treatsa group of distinctive stone votive stupas from the area ofthe Northern Liang in upper Gansu, dating mostly to the fifthcentury. The third chapter is a close examination of the veryearliest Buddhist images, made between 495 and 504 CE, atthe Northern Wei site of Longmen. Finally, the fourth chapterdiscusses Buddhist and related Daoist sculptures (princi-pally votive steles) made in Shaanxi in the fifth and earlysixth centuries. Most of these objects have long been knownas “problems” in the history of Chinese art because they donot fit the conventional narratives describing the develop-ment of Buddhist art and thought in China. For instance, theEastern Han images are clearly identifiable as Buddha-figures but are deployed in distinctly “un-Buddhist” ways,and the Liang stupas are so distinctive in style and iconog-raphy that they appear to be unrelated to Buddhist art mak-ing elsewhere in China. In some cases, these chapters areamong the first extended treatments of these materials inEnglish, and as such represent an important resource.

One of the ways in which Abe’s book differs from previ-ous writings on Buddhist art history is in his willingness totake on bodies of material that are visually heterogeneous orhistorically complex without either seeking to reduce theircomplexity in the interests of analytic clarity or dismissingthem as impossible to study because of their heterogeneity.This is of a piece with his determination to reexamine art-works that conventional analysis had been inclined to dis-miss, but it can sometimes make the book difficult to read.Abe himself concedes that his analysis has produced “a kindof knowledge about the workings of images as well as classthat is often awkward and not completely satisfying” (315).While this may be true, it is also true that he has beensuccessful in one of his aims, which was to open a discussionon materials that had seemed closed to inquiry. It is this goalthat has demanded the open-endedness of his approach:“Rather than crafting the evidence into a tightly knit argu-ment with an inevitable consummation,” he writes, “eachchapter has been an attempt to push the body of evidence orinterpretive strategy to its limit—that is, those peripheralpoints at which any argument begins to lose its cohesion andmomentum” (317).

Ordinary Images

remains the first venturein the conversation which is represented by the other arthistory volumes reviewed here.

Abe’s and Kieschnick’s books are not only earlier thanthe other books reviewed here, but they also share anotherquality: neither is based on its author’s dissertation. Abe’s1990 thesis on Dunhuang cave 254 was published in con-densed form as an article (Abe 1991), and Kieschnick’s 1995dissertation on the biographies of eminent monks was pub-lished in book form (Kieschnick 1997). The other four booksreviewed here are for the most part revisions of dissertationscompleted in 1996 and 1997, although in some cases after a

considerable transformation. Wang’s dissertation, forinstance, has become a section of a greatly expanded intel-lectual project in his book. Thus, they can be seen not onlyas part of the general growth of the social history of ChineseBuddhist art, but also as evidence for the roots of this trendin the expansion of graduate programs in Chinese art historysince about 1990. In particular, Ning, Wong, and Wang wereall students of Wu Hung’s at Harvard University, and whileeach has his or her own particular intellectual style andapproach, the conversation between them undoubtedlybegan long before the publication of the books reviewedhere.

1

As a Berkeley graduate and a student of the eminentpainting scholar J. Cahill, Fraser is the exception here,although in any event her innovative project, which seeks tobridge the worlds of classical painting study and Buddhistart history, sets her work apart.

Fraser’s book,

Performing the Visual: The Practice of Bud-dhist Wall Painting in China and Central Asia 618-960

, takesas its central subject of inquiry the artists’ sketches (

fenben

)found among the documents in the famous Dunhuanglibrary cave. For the most part, the sketches date to the Tangand Five Dynasties, which provide the historical limits forFraser’s inquiry. Her main thesis is that the Dunhuangsketches can be used to explain not only the practice ofartists at Dunhuang itself, but that they also represent animportant resource for understanding both the practices ofTang artists in central China and the aesthetic theoriesbehind them. Tang painting practice is otherwise only doc-umented in written records, often with a strong flavor of thelegendary about them, and direct evidence of any kind issorely lacking. The difficulty, however, lies in demonstratinga connection between the practices of artists working in afrontier oasis such as Dunhuang and those working in thecapital and at the court. Even in the cosmopolitan Tangdynasty, the distance between Dunhuang and Chang’anmust be accounted for and bridged.

The first two chapters of Fraser’s book deal primarilywith the practices of Tang painters at Dunhuang. The first isan intensive study of the economics of Buddhist artmakingat Dunhuang during the Tang, including the relationshipsbetween painting workshops and guilds, monasteries, andpatrons. The second makes a close comparison between sur-viving sketches and existing wall paintings of the samethemes (focusing on the Subjugation of Raudraksa, whichshe calls the “Magic Competition”). In this way, Fraser infersa great deal about the different methods that Dunhuangpainters used to “translate” the sketches they made, whichare often fragmentary, random or not carefully proportioned,into completed large-scale mural paintings.

In the third chapter, Fraser examines other sketchesand monochrome drawings, generally later in date and notconnected with Dunhuang, which she relates to practices of



12

mural painting. This chapter is framed in terms of the influ-ence of the Dunhuang sketches (109ff.), implying that thesketches themselves are ancestral to later

baimiao

(mono-chrome fine-line) drawing techniques of the eleventh to thir-teenth centuries. The fourth chapter compares two othertypes of sketches from Dunhuang, those made by artists inpreparation for painting silk banners and those made bymonks as diagrams for ritual practice, in an effort to distin-guish what constituted true artistic practice (as opposed toamateur sketchmaking). The fifth chapter is dedicated toexploring ideas of orality and performativity in the differentversions (both textual and visual) of the Magic Competition.Finally, in the sixth chapter, these same ideas are broughtto bear on the themes of performance and spontaneity thatpervade Tang dynasty accounts of artists in action.

Fraser’s book contains a tremendous wealth of informa-tion on painters and their practice at Dunhuang, and for thisit is invaluable. The main problem with her larger thesis,however, is that it is based on the assumption that thesketches found at Dunhuang are typical examples of Tangartists’ sketches from all over China, an assumption that thereader must accept on faith from the third chapter onward.This is the assumption that allows her to draw connectionsbetween the aesthetic theories of the Tang, which ascribenear mystical powers of spontaneous creation to artists suchas Wu Daozi or Zhang Zao; and a group of indisputably Tang-era artworks. For centuries, art historians and antiquarianshave lamented their inability to see firsthand the paintingsthat inspired such remarkable critical writing. Here, Fraserproposes a solution to that very old problem. The sameassumption allows her to make connections between theorthodox history of painting in China, which often excludesboth religious painting and marginal regions of the empire,and one of the most important archaeological discoveries ofthe twentieth century. The study of archaeology and tradi-tional painting studies have not previously found manypoints of conversation, and this would prove an importantone, if it were possible to prove that the Dunhuang sketchesare both as representative and as influential as Fraser pro-poses. It is to be hoped that future research will confirm herthesis and vindicate the fascinating possibilities sheproposes.

Ning’s book,

Art, Religion, and Politics in MedievalChina: The Dunhuang Cave of the Zhai Family

, exemplifiesthe 1990s trend toward dissertations focusing on the in-depth investigation and interpretation of a single cave orcave site. Ning’s is among the few such dissertations to bebrought to publication. The concept behind such investiga-tions might be best understood as a kind of intense contex-tualization or a programmatic approach. It is based in parton a methodology set out by Wu Hung in his dissertation andsubsequent book

The Wu Liang Shrine

(Wu 1989).

The Wu

Liang Shrine

reads the relief-carved decorations of the epon-ymous Han dynasty funerary shrine in spatial terms, that is,in their spatial relationship to each other and to the orienta-tion of the shrine itself. While the individual motifs can beidentified as to source and meaning, the ultimate object ofinquiry is an overall pictorial program, which gives meaningto the space of the shrine as a whole. An interest in thedeployment of artworks in spaces such as tombs and cavetemples and in the way in which the meaning of such spacesis described or even determined by their decorative pro-grams is characteristic of the work of many of Wu Hung’sstudents.

Ning’s particular project is Dunhuang Cave 220, a cavetemple that was built in the mid-seventh century by mem-bers of a prominent local family, the Zhai clan, and that wasapparently renovated, maintained, and used by them moreor less continually over a span of about three centuries. Cave220 is one of the earliest datable Tang caves at Dunhuangand boasts several iconographic innovations, which wouldensure its interest to art historians in any case. But beyondthis, it is the cave’s history as a “family cave” continuouslymaintained and patronized by members of a single familythat makes it remarkable. Ning’s book recounts the historyof the cave from its construction through several waves ofrenovation and reuse over time.

As Ning himself acknowledges (9-10), his approach isinformed not only by Wu Hung’s ideas about pictorialprograms and symbolic space, but also by an interest in thepolitical uses of art in a public context, as exemplified by thework of M. Powers (1992). This approach is inclined to seeacts of art patronage as tools of the political ambition of thepatron. Ning notes that Zhai family members were politi-cally prominent citizens of Dunhuang for several centuries,and for this reason he is inclined to give much of theirpatronage of Dunhuang cave 220 a political motivation. Forexample, the tenth-century repainting of the cave featuredmany representations of auspicious images associated withthe kingdom of Khotan, at a time when ties between Dun-huang and Khotan were very close. In fact, at the time of therepainting, in 925 CE, Dunhuang was playing host to a dip-lomatic mission from Khotan. Ning reads the full-scale ren-ovation of the Zhai family cave as principally motivated bypolitical goals. He writes, “As a cultural representative of thelocal government, Zhai Fengda . . . turned this religiouspainting into a work of political propaganda for local diplo-macy” (103).

In a sense, this is not so much a social history of art asa political history of art. While Ning is right to point out thatreligious motivations alone are not sufficient to explain thework that the Zhai family invested in Cave 220, the impor-tance that he ascribes to specifically political motivationstends to obscure other possible concerns such as social

13



class, kinship relations, gender identity, and so on. Further-more, the political motivations he imagines have primarilyto do with currying favor with whoever was in power inDunhuang at the time. It seems possible that the politicaluses of religious art might be more complex than simpleflattery. In particular, it would be useful to know the contem-porary political value of being seen as a devout supporter ofBuddhism, or as the head of an eminent family that couldmuster support for major projects of art patronage. Finally,Ning’s approach effectively treats the Zhai family as a coher-ent unit with unified political aims without considering thatinternal family dynamics and particular individual person-alities may have shaped the family’s activities at Dunhuang.Of course, it is not clear that sufficient evidence exists toanswer all these questions in full, but Ning’s failure to raisethem gives the impression that political ambition providesthe only possible motivation for several centuries of work atCave 220.

Wong’s book,

Chinese Steles: Pre-Buddhist and BuddhistUse of a Symbolic Form

, is a social history of art in the guiseof a more traditional study tracing the changes over time ina particular object type, the stele or

bei

. A stele is an uprightstone tablet fixed in the ground, originally inscribed withtext and used in the Han for funerary purposes, to memori-alize a person or mark a grave, and for commemorativepurposes, to record a significant historical event or the ren-ovation of an important historical site. With the introductionof Buddhism, it became a medium for Buddhist image mak-ing, and Buddhist steles typically consist of a combinationof relief-carved images and inscriptions. Buddhist steleswere produced from the Northern and Southern Dynastiesperiod through the early part of the Tang dynasty, while thestele as a medium for inscribed texts continued to be pro-duced throughout the history of China (the 1952 Memorialto the People’s Heroes in Tiananmen Square being a modernexample).

Wong’s investigation of the history of the stele becomesa work of social history because of the particular way inwhich the form was adapted to the production of Buddhistvotive sculpture. Many Buddhist steles were sponsored notby individual patrons or small family groups but by largevillage organizations called

yiyi

or

yishe

, in which many Bud-dhists of modest means, typically all residents of the samevillage or prefecture, pooled their resources to sponsor theconstruction of a stele along with other merit-making activ-ities such as the support of Buddhist monks and monaster-ies, the copying of sutras, the sponsorship of rituals andlectures, and charity and vegetarian feasts for the poor. Theycould also function as mutual aid societies in times of diffi-culty. Wong’s main thesis is that the

yishe

grew out of earlier,pre-Buddhist village societies (

she

) devoted to the worshipof the local earth gods, which in turn allowed the stone

tablets (

bei

) that such societies had used in their devotionsto be adapted to Buddhist image-making practices. Theinscriptions of many such Buddhist steles indicate that theywere placed in marketplaces or at crossroads (that is, in thepublic centers of a village) rather than in a temple or mon-astery, which reinforces this connection.

Wong’s book includes one of the most thoroughaccounts in English of the system of collective art patronageunder the

yishe

, and as such, it is an important sourcefor social historians of Buddhist art, beyond its other art-historical aims. Its account of the development of the Budd-hist stele is equally important but is complicated by aproblem of terminology. In modern Chinese usage, the word

bei

(stele) is often used not only for large stone tablets witha combination of sculpture and inscription, but also forsmaller, freestanding sculptures of a size that implies theywere displayed on a table or altar rather than standing onthe ground. These smaller sculptures are often carved inhigh relief, coming close to sculpture in the round, and ifthey are inscribed, the inscription is usually short and lim-ited to the base or reverse of the piece. This is in contrast tothe stele proper, which is basically a tablet bearing relieffigures on its surface, and which may be inscribed over asignificant part of its surface. Although these freestandingsmall sculptures are also sometimes the product of collective(

yishe

) patronage, it seems clear that their form is notderived from the pre-Buddhist steles that Wong discusses.Rather, because most of these smaller sculptures consist ofgroups of figures against an arch-shaped background, itseems most likely that they are freestanding versions of thesculptural niches, many of them arch shaped, that are foundin many Buddhist cave temples of the period. As such, whilethey clearly belong in Wong’s account of collective artpatronage, they fit less well into her account of the changingsignificance of the stele form. Nevertheless, the bookremains an important account of patterns of patronage andtheir relationship to the forms of Buddhist sculpture pro-duced in the medieval period.

One of the common qualities of the books discussed sofar has been their tendency to focus on the social history ofart, putting questions of religious doctrine and belief in asecondary position. While it might be possible (for example)to map the appearance of Maitreya images as a way ofassessing the extent of Maitreya devotion or to determinewhich translation of a given sutra provided the source for aparticular image in order to understand the spread of a par-ticular doctrine, the primary interests of these authors aregenerally elsewhere. This is certainly a response to paststudies that considered the only significance of Buddhistartworks to be religious. It may also grow out of an aware-ness on the part of art historians of the difficulty of master-ing the Buddhological literature and of the dangers of



14

uninformed speculation on the intricacies of Buddhist phi-losophy in China.

Wang’s book,

Shaping

The Lotus Sutra: Buddhist VisualCulture in Medieval China

, is one of the first recent works ofChinese art history to make a concerted effort to combineart-historical theory with Buddhist metaphysics. It is, at bot-tom, an investigation into the concept of transformation asused in the famous “transformation tableaux” (

bianxiang

) ofmedieval (particularly Tang) Buddhist art. This investigationis focused on visual materials “more or less related to theLotus Sutra” (xx) but aims to suggest a methodology thatwould be equally applicable to other subjects and themes inBuddhist art. In effect, Wang proposes that the richly visualand spatial, cosmological, metaphorical, and illusionisticqualities of the Lotus and other sutras are not reduced tomundane physical reality in the production of images.Rather, he would read the visual material as embodyingthese metaphysical qualities to the same extent as the text,and his book is an attempt to describe how this is accom-plished. To do so, he introduces the idea of the “dream worldof the Lotus Sutra” (xv), that is, the mental space of conceptsand associations that connects and gives rise to all the tex-tual and visual iterations of the sutra itself.

The book is organized into six chapters. The first is asort of study in miniature, focusing not on the Lotus Sutraas a whole but on visual realizations of one particular sec-tion, the Apparition of the Many Treasures Stupa, and theprocess by which this theme becomes an independent sub-ject. This is something of a diversion from the main thrustof the book, to the extent that Wang suggests that moregeneral readers may want to begin the book from chaptertwo (xxiv). The remaining five chapters are organized notby subject matter but by conceptual theme; they havetitles like “Mapping and Transformation” and “Chronotopeand Heterotopia.” The second and third chapters focus onthe Lotus Sutra tableau in Dunhuang cave 217, dating tothe early Tang, as a form of “imaginary topography” (68)that created a space for all manner of ritual, political, andsocial themes to be worked out. The fourth and fifth chap-ters deal more specifically with aspects of composition ofthe Lotus Sutra tableau, which allow it to be read as eithera mirror or a map, two forms of spatialized representationthat have important resonances in Buddhist metaphysics.Finally, the sixth chapter is a study of a Tang stupa fromShandong province, the Longhuta, which was the subjectof Wang’s dissertation. He interprets the spatial scheme ofthe stupa’s imagery as both a Bakhtinian chronotope and aFoucauldian heterotopia—in sum, a space apart from bothplace and time, enabling apparently contradictory religiousand social ambitions on the part of the donors to beresolved in a way that the linearity of text might findimpossible.

Wang’s project is so complex and ambitious that it isdifficult to assess its success, particularly if one is not deeplyfamiliar with the Lotus Sutra in all its forms. Anyone whohas read even one of the Buddhist sutras that were popularin medieval China has no doubt been struck by the remark-ably vivid imagery that pervades them. The visual worlddescribed by the sutras is imaginative to the point of phan-tasmagoria, with thousands upon thousands of miraculouslymanifested worlds, all furnished with jeweled towers andmagical pools. Wang’s question is a natural one: why shouldwe not expect the pictorial realizations of this world toembody the same mind-twisting range of ideas? At the sametime, the question raises a possible objection from the pointof view of the social history of religion. Is it reasonable toexpect all manifestations of a Buddhist theme, especially oneas popular as the Lotus Sutra, to reflect equally the intellec-tual complexity of the canonical text? The historical limits ofliteracy in premodern China suggest that we may expect tofind more simplified and popularized versions of thesethemes in the visual arts, where pictorial imagery may haveserved as text for the illiterate. Wang’s approach representsa challenge to this idea. It opens up the possibility that atleast some of the images of medieval Buddhism were everybit as complex and abstruse as the ideas of contemporaryBuddhist philosophy, and demands that we account for thispossibility in future studies.

These six works are the first steps in an ongoing revi-talization of the study of the Buddhist art of medieval China.If they cannot always be said to participate in the samediscussion, it is largely because the questions remaining tobe asked are so numerous; with so much work to be done,the field has yet to develop a critical mass of writings thatcan constitute a true intellectual history. Each writer is stillfaced with the problem of defining the terms of his or herparticular debate rather than stepping into an ongoing con-versation. Nonetheless, these works are linked by theirdesire to understand the world of Buddhist art history as avital and multifarious one, characterized by complexity tothe point of heterodoxy, and integrally linked to the socialand political lives and the spiritual and mental universes ofits human participants. The possibilities, it appears, are end-less, and all of us working in the field of Buddhist art historyowe much to these authors for their part in this ambitiousintellectual project.

NOTES

1. It should also be noted, in the interests of full disclosure, thatthe author of this review was an undergraduate at Harvard inthe early 1990s, knew the aforementioned three authors asgraduate teaching assistants and advisors, and later went onto earn a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, with Wu Hungas advisor (he moved to the University of Chicago in 1994). In

15



other words, I am describing here a conversation in which Ihave been a junior participant, and an intellectual lineage ofwhich I, myself, am a descendant. The reader will decidewhether this makes me an informed insider or a biased source.

REFERENCES

Abe, Stanley K.

1991 “Art and Practice in a Fifth Century Chinese Bud-dhist Cave Temple.”

Ars Orientalis

, 20, 1-31.

Kieschnick, John

1997

The Eminent Monk: Buddhist Ideals in Medieval Chi-nese Hagiography

. Honolulu: University of HawaiiPress.

Powers, Martin

1992

Art and Political Expression in Early China

. NewHaven, CT: Yale University Press.

Teiser, Stephen F.

1996 “Introduction: The Spirits of Chinese Religion.” In D.S. L

OPEZ

, Jr. (ed.),

Religions of China in Practice

, 3-37.Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Wu, Hung

1989

The Wu Liang Shrine: The Ideology of Early ChinesePictorial Art

. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

social histories of buddhist art in medieval china

Documents