soper_a t'ang parinirvana stele

A T'ang Parinirva SteleAuthor(s): Alexander C. SoperSource: Artibus Asiae, Vol. 22, No. 1/2 (1959), pp. 159-169Published by: Artibus Asiae PublishersStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3249153 .Accessed: 20/02/2014 05:52

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ALEXANDER C. SOPER

A T'ANG PARINIRVANA STELE

T he T'ang Buddhist stele to be discussed below stands - or stood in 1941, when it was seen and photographed by the Japanese archaeologists Mizuno and Hibiya - in one of the buildings of the Confucian shrine in the prefectural town of I-shih, in the southwestern tip of Shansi. Along with a great variety of other sculptural and architectural monuments, it has been published in the exemplary guide-book that records the finds made by the two Japanese along the valley of the Fen River, downstream from T'ai-ytian-fu'. It seems to me to warrant further notice here for two main reasons. It is a work of extraordinary interest, and deserves more prolonged examination than could be given it in the restricted dimensions of the Shansi report. In addition, the latter is probably not well known outside of Japan, and its rich store of information is accessible only through the Japanese language.

The stele is a large one, 2.81 metres high, with the interlacing dragon crown and the tortoise base common to monumental T'ang practise (figs. i, 2). Both faces are elaborately carved, for the most part with scenes that deal with the Buddha's Parinirvina. Unfortunately the stone stands too close to the wall to permit more than the front to be photographed. On this side a dado-like area is left at the bottom for donors' names and titles (fig. i). Then follow, in ascend- ing order:

The Buddha's last formal preaching, at the house of Cunda; The entry into Nirvana. Four smaller scenes, intended to be read in a clockwise sense, beginning at the upper right

(fig. 2). These show: Queen Maya's lamentation over the closed coffin; The miraculous rescuscitation, and last words to Maya; The funeral procession; The cremation.

In the area between the dragon legs rises Mount Sumeru. A title for the stele runs down the frame between the four small panels, reading: "Great

Chou, Great Cloud Temple; humbly on behalf of the Sacred and Divine Imperial Majesty, one stele with scenes of the Nirvania has been reverently made." ("Chou" was the dynastic name assumed by the usurping empress-dowager, Lady Wu, for the period of her titular rule, 690-705.)

The description of the rear face given in the Shansi report might be rendered as follows2:

I Mizuno S. and Hibiya T., Shansai Koseki-shi, Kyato, I956; a research report of the Jimbun Kagaku Kenkyi-sho of Ky6to University. My illustrations are reproduced through the kindness of Professor Mizuno.

2 Ibid., pp. 153-54.

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"First, between the dragon forms, a reliquary pagoda is carved. The body of the stele is divided into three tiers. In the top tier is shown the scene of the partition of the relics between the eight kings. At the center is a large relic coffer with an enclosing screen, supported by four naked men. Single monks are seated on left and right, while two more stand on either side above them, behind the coffer. In the foreground, arranged on diagonals, are four kneeling figures, who look as if they were being given something. To left and right of these kneelers are a total of eight men, with attendants behind them, all reverently facing the coffer; so that they must be the eight kings who are receiving the relics.

"The middle tier has at its center a Buddha seated with legs down, on a lotus stalk. He is flanked on right and left by Buddhas squatting on multiple lotus thrones, with overhanging skirts. Judging from the inscription alongside, the central figure must be Maitreya and the left- hand one Sakyamuni. The other, then, may be Amitabha. Between the three Buddhas stand four Bodhisattvas, all on lotus stalks."

"The bottom tier has a votive inscription entitled 'Stele for the Two-storeyed Maitreya Pavilion of the Great Cloud Temple, Ta-yuin-ssu'..."

"The ends of the stele show lions at the bottom and then mailed Vajrapani figures. Above, a lotus stalk in rinceau form holds a Bodhisattva within each of its loops, making four in all."

With reference to the inscription, the Japanese summary notes the names and titles recorded for the composer of the text, the calligrapher, and the "chief supervisor of the stele's manu- facture", i. e. the master sculptor. The temple's prior is called a native of I-shih - the old place name has survived unchanged. The inscription goes on to state that "on the twenty-fourth day of the second month of the second year of T'ien-shou [i. e. 691] the temple was renamed Ta- ytun-ssu in conformity to law; while in the following year its title was again changed, in conformity to law, to Jen-shou-ssu, the Temple of Mercy and Longevity3." At the end is a dedi- catory phrase dated 858; but the Japanese dismiss this as a later addition, pointing out that the inscription proper contains the special characters used during the empress dowager's "Great Chou" regime, and must certainly have been executed in 692. They note that the stele was brought into the town in 1921 from an old hillside temple which still bears the name Jen-shou- ssu, and is said to have been founded in the Sui dynasty. Its brief existence as Ta-ytin-ssu was unquestionably due to the operation of one of those sweeping edicts by which the usurping Lady Wu showed her might. A spurious Buddhist scripture, the "Sfitra of the Great Cloud", had been interpreted in 690 to prove that she was none other than Maitreya in His next-to-last incarnation, and so was divinely destined to rule over the whole world. To exploit this revelation as fully as possible, temples were founded, or appropriated, in the satra's name throughout the empire, to house copies of the text4. Presumably the I-shih monastery received not only a new name, but a new major building, a lofty pavilion dedicated to Maitreya; while the propaganda importance of the latter deity explains His presence on our stele, alongside a cycle otherwise devoted exclusively to Sakyamuni.

Since almost all of the Buddhist art of the Far East was produced under strong Mahayana inspiration and so showed little interest in Sakyamuni's earthly career, representations even of

3 The whole text of the inscription is published in the Chinese anthology Shan Yu Shih K'e Ts'ung-pien, v. 4 On this act, see the Buddhist encyclopedia of Mochizuki S., Bukkyj Daijiten, Taky6, 1936 (2nd. ed.), pp. 3195-96, entry

"Daiunji". Also L. Wieger, Textes historiques, Hsien-hsien, 1923, II, pp. 1380-81.

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Fig. I Parinirv;qna stele of 692, lower half

I-shib, Shansi


Fig. 2

Parinirv.na stele of 692, upper half I-shih, Shansi


the dogmatically central scene of the Parinirv.na

seem always to have been infrequent there. Narrative cycles devoted to the whole sequence of events preceding and following the "Great Release" must have been rarer stills. No other example known to me is quite as leisurely and generous in its story-telling as our present stele. Two other examples, frescoes at Tun-huang, approach it closely in iconography, and suggest by their greater fluency and expressiveness that the theme is likely to have been first worked out by painters. On the remarkable Parinirvina wall of Cave 146, which may be attributed to roughly the same period as the stele, the narrative is set against a panoramic landscape6. The episodes are informally ranged along a sinuous line of action, moving and rising out of the lower right and finally curving back again. The three partly obliterated groups at the start must illustrate the last sermon, the entry proper, and the lamentation over the closed coffin. The fourth, which looks as if it had been deliberately isolated for greater emphasis, clearly shows the miraculous reemergence of Sdkyamuni, who sits on the edge of His open sarcophagus to preach to His miraculously recalled mother, kneeling in the guise of a Chinese queen. Above, the funeral cortege winds this way and that through a rocky landscape, heading toward a bridge. The final, indistinct group at the upper right must stand for the cremation; a memorial stfipa is just visible. The episode of the quarrel over the relics is transformed into an almost gay encounter of galloping knights, set like a frieze just under the cornice of the room.

The other fresco version occurs in two of the dado panels of the huge, late Cave i 177. Here, perhaps as an accidental result of the general stiffening and formalization seen throughout the late Tun-huang style, the resemblance to the stele's design is much closer. The sequence begins at the bottom of the left-hand panel, rises, crosses at the top, and descends to the bottom on the right: i.e. in the same clockwise sense, though with a different starting-point. The same main episodes occur. The painter has been more faithful to his scriptural authorities than the artist of Cave 146, and less imaginative, as the temper of his age made natural. The funeral procession is shown outside the city of Kudinagara, through which the siatras insist that it traced an elaborate, crisscrossing route before halting at the cremation ground. The relic scene, finally, is staged as a solemn, symmetrical distribution, in the manner of the panel on the rear of our stele.

Detailed analysis of the stele is possible at present only through the single - but excellent - photograph taken by the Japanese archaeologists.

To begin with the wide scene at the bottom, it is obvious that the literal requirements of the story have been played down to permit the use of a typical Mahayana assemblage; the intention being perhaps to provide one such group, centering on Sdkyamuni, on the front of the stele to balance the Maitreya group on the rear. Only the kneeling figures of the lower tier, in clerical or lay dress, and the preaching Sgkyamuni are proper to the theme of the last sermon. The figure at the center, seen from the rear in isolation, is presumably the lay devotee Cunda of the

s For general comments on this sequence see A. Foucher, La vie du Bouddha d'apres les textes et les monuments de l'Inde, Paris, 1949, pp. 30Iff.; for a close analysis of the early textual evidence, J.Przyluski, "Le ParinirvIina et les funerailles du Bouddha, examen comparatif des textes," Journal Asiatique, IIe ser. XI, 1918, continued in XII, XIII, and XIV; for the material available in Chinese translations, Matsumoto E., Tonki-ga no Kenkyz, Thky6, 1937, Pp. 235-49.

6 Ibid., pp. 238-39, pl. LXXXIV, b; P. Pelliot Lesgrottes de Touen-houang, Paris, 1914, pl. CCCXXI. 7 Matsumoto, pp. 235-38, pl. LXXXIV, a; Pelliot, pl. CCXIV. This is one of the latest donations of the local ruling

house of Ts'ao, executed in the early years of the Sung dynasty.

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village of Pava, whose generosity provided a last meal for the Buddha and His discipless8. The rectangle in front of him must represent an altar-like table, on which the maigre feast is set out in various types of containers. The upper tier of Bodhisattvas and gods, miraculously seated or standing on lotus blossoms, lend the scene the incongruous look of a Paradise. Their arrange- ment, indeed, shows a simple version of the formula that underlies all the great Paradises, or Paradise-like assemblages, found in the Tun-huang frescoes of the eighth century and later. Their actual effect is more closely paralleled, however, in the kind of sacra conversazione found in the round in the T'ang caves of T'ien-lung Shan. The latter site, some zoo miles upstream from the old "Great Cloud Temple", in the vicinity of the provincial capital, provides several fairly close approximations of the stele panel's figure style. The grouping and characterization of the deities are recalled, in a somewhat stiffer and perhaps slightly earlier rendering, in Cave XVIII. The small, ruinous triad of Cave V is quite like the three major figures of the stele; while the single, squatting Bodhisattvas of Caves IV and VI differ chiefly in being shown with an air of alertness, rather than the stele's languorg.

The standing deity type, which lacks both the elaborate crown and the double, crossing scarf lines of the earlier T'ang and Sui styles, is essentially that repeated in the Ch'ang-an reliefs of Pao-ch'ing-ssu, several of which are dated in the first years of the eighth centuryIo. The figure on S~kyamuni's right also recalls the standing Bodhisattvas of Cave 146 at Tun-huang, and so helps in linking the latter's frescoes to the stele cycleII.

The important elements in the Parinirvana scene above define it as a transitional design, combining both ancient and modern details. The Buddha's pose, particularly the use of the right hand to support the head, is the traditional one, which may be traced back to Gandharan sculpture and to the Nirvdna scriptures; in almost all other versions in the Far East both arms are extended and enclose the trunk. The complexity of the group of mourners is still fairly restrained, being not much greater than that seen in the late Gandharan relief from Loriyan- tangaiIz. The later Chinese development moved toward a picturesque universality. The so- called "VWu Tao-tzu" paintings in the late Sung style, as seen for example in the excellent Japanese copy at the museum in Cologne, exaggerate to the utmost degree the differences between the attending figures, and push their expressions of grief to the verge of caricature's. Even so, the human and divine mourners and the figure of S~kyamuni Himself seem in that age to have been found too traditional to carry the full burden of pictorial interest. As a result they are backed into the middle distance; while the whole of the foreground is surrendered to the animal kingdom, rendered with an even more bizarre combination of realism and grotesque pathos.

The much more conservative stage reached by the middle of the ninth century is recorded

8 Foucher, pp. 304-306. The early texts innocently speak of a meal of roast pork, which proved fatal to k5kyamuni's already enfeebled body. The late account quoted by Mochizuki, pp. 2525-26, entry "Junda", has yielded to the dietary strictness of full-fledged Buddhist monasticism, and so speaks instead of a cryptically-named, but certainly vegetarian dish, "ears from the sandalwood tree".

9 Naito T., Tenrydzan, T6ky6, 1922, pls. 75, 31, 34, 33 respectively. 10 O. Siren, Chinese Sculpture, London, 1925, pls. 391ff.; Omura S., Shina Bijutsu-shi, Ch&so-hen, Tokya, 1915, pls. 330ff.; et alia.

11 Pelliot, pl. CCCXX. i2 Foucher, L'art grico-bouddhique du Gandhdra, Paris, 1905, fig. 277. 13 A. da Silva-Vigier, The Life of the Buddha, London, 19 55, pls. 130-31.

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by the Japanese pilgrim Ennin among the sights of the great pilgrimage center Wu-t'ai Shan, in north central Shansi. He saw, in the words of his diaryI4:

"The sixteen-foot figure [of the Buddha] lying on His right side beneath the twin trees; the figure of the Lady Maya swooning to the ground in anguish; the Four Lokapalas, the Eight Classes of Demi-gods, celestial beings, and a crowd of saints, some holding up their hands and weeping bitterly, some with their eyes closed in a attitude of contemplation: all executed in ac- cordance with the scriptures."

Our late seventh century version of the scene is not clearly enough shown in the photograph to prove the presence of any supernatural beings beyond the two Apsarases in the sky. Two mailed warriors at the far right may stand for the Lokapalas. A male figure next to them, holding a staff-like object above his head with both hands, is likely to represent Vajrapani throwing his golden mace on the ground, as some of the texts describe him. The rest of the crowd may well be composed merely of monks and of the male and female devotees from the city of Ku'inagara. The beginning of an interest in the grief of the animal world is evident in the figure of a lion at the lower right, with his forepaw on a step of the funeral couch. In the great K6yasan Nirvana picture of io86, which probably derives from some early Sung original, there is again a lion in the same corner - shown, however, rolling on his back in an absurd abandonment to sorrows5.

The extraordinary crouching form in the left foreground of the stele panel has so far defied decipherment. Some of its details suggest a human figure wearing a fantastic headdress, bending almost to the ground and clutching his right thigh; roughly similar beings, representing the demi-gods, are found in the foreground of the K6yasan picture.

There seems to be no Queen Maya in the panel. The single monkish figure who bows his head over the Buddha's feet is probably Maha Ka-yapa.

Mention of these two persons requires a brief digression. The fully developed iconography of the Parinirvina permitted emphasis to be given to one or another of four secondary figures associated in various ways with the Buddha's passing. The natural first candidate would seem to have been Ananda, Sdkyamuni's faithful attendant and helper. Ananda's importance for the early Church, however, was gravely compromised by jealous rivals. His role in the growing

Parinirv.na legend came to be obscured, or was even reinterpreted to his detriment. In con-

sequence he was celebrated only rarely; and probably nowhere else with the unique majesty given him in the colossal, twelfth century, rock-cut group at Polonnaruva in CeylonI6.

The old Brahman Maha KaSyapa, Ananda's chief opponent, admittedly played no part in the Buddha's last days. His adherents were shrewd enough to turn his late arrival into a propaganda asset. It was said that in his absence the mourners were unable to light the funeral pyre; and even more impressively, that Sakyamuni - who had willed to remain unburned until the great disciple should come to bid him farewell - vouchsafed at the end a still stranger miracle. As Kifyapa knelt at the foot of the coffin, his master's feet emerged to receive his salutation. When

'4 Adapted from the translation by E. O. Reischauer, Ennin's Diary, New York, 1955, pp. 224 and 230 (the description being given twice, in not quite identical forms).

's Frequently reproduced, recently in Fine Arts of the Heian Period, Kyato, 1958, pl. 17-18. I6 Da Silva-Vigier, op. cit., pl. 15 .

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they were withdrawn, the pyre burst spontaneously into flame. This moment was particularly stressed in the late Hinayana cave paintings of the Kucha style17.

Another Brahman ascetic, Subhadra, emerged from anonymity in the Buddha's final hours as the last, personal convert, accorded immediate sainthood by Sakyamuni's dying wish. When his part of the legend reached its full growth, he was said to have preceded his master into Nirvaina, ending his life in the voluntary cremation of the "fire samadhi." An isolated position in front of the funeral couch identifies him in certain Gandharan reliefs 8 ; he reappears there with a silhouette of flames in the fresco of Cave I 17 at Tun-huang.

The most expressive role was that won by the Buddha's mortal mother. All the early accounts had agreed prosaically that Queen Maya died a week after His birth. Pious speculation had imagined her as reborn in the Heaven of the Thirthy-three Gods; one train of thought assigned her the further reward of a male bodyi9. To give this bleak karma diagram some semblance of human warmth, two mother-and-son legends were invented. The earlier, current at least by the period of the Bharhut sculptures, imagined the Buddha at the height of His career undertaking a pious ascent to His mother's heaven, to preach to her - re-feminized - and her fellow deities20o. The second story, which made the divine Maya a participant in the lamentation over her son, was probably formulated a good deal later. It is not mentioned among the aspects of the Pari- nirvana that the Chinese pilgrim Fa-hsien found commemorated at Ku'inagara in the early fifth century21. On the other hand it does appear, full-blown, in the Mahd Myad Sitra, a brief, minor scripture which was translated into Chinese at Nanking during the last quarter of the same century2z. The crucial passage runs:

'Thereupon Maha Maya... came down from the sky, hastening to the place where the twin trees grew. On reaching the sala grove and seeing from a distance the Buddha's coffin, she was overcome by an unbearable sorrow. When the gods had sprinkled water on her face and so brought her back to consciousness, she went straightway to the coffin, and bowed her head upon it in adoration... Then the World-honored One, using His supernatural powers, com- manded all the lids of His multi-layered coffin to open spontaneously. He Himself rose out of the coffin with hands pressed together, bursting forth like a lion-king who rushes from his cave; while from every one of the hair-pores of His body there shone forth Iooo rays of light, each containing Iooo miraculously-created Buddhas..."

The account goes on to tell of the words of consolation and wisdom which He bestowed before His second and irrevocable disappearance. I cannot argue here the question whether this extraordinary turn of the

Parinirv.na legend was invented by late Hinayana preachers in India

proper, or was borrowed in the passage of Buddhism beyond the northwest frontier, from some I7 E.g. A.Griinwedel, Alt-Kutscha, Berlin, 1920, pls. XLIV-XLV. 18 E.g. H. Ingholt, Gandhdran Art in Pakistan, New York, 1957, figs. 138-140. An earlier Tun-huang version showing the

Arhat enveloped in flames is that of the Sui cave I26B; see Basil Gray, Buddhist Cave Paintings at Tun-huang, Chicago, 1959, pl. 27.

I9 Foucher, Vie, pp. 65-69. 20 Ibid., pp. 274-277. 2, Trsl. by S. Beal, Buddhist Records of the Western World, London, 19o06, I, p. lii. 22 Translated by T'an-ching under the Southern Ch'i; no. 382 in Nanjio's catalogue; reprinted in the Japanese Tripitaka

Daizgjky6, XII, pp. IOI2c-IOI3a. The mid seventh century Chinese pilgrim Hsuan-tsang tells much the same story, and claims to have been shown at Ku'inagara a stiipa marking the spot where Mdyd mourned: Beal, op. cit., II, p. 38. The scene of the emergence from the golden coffin was isolated and given its most monumental treatment in Heian Japan, in the great picture belonging to Ch6haji in Kyato (reproduced in color in Fine Arts of the Heian Period, pl. 2).

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other religion in which the sorrowing mother theme had been long established. The point to be made is simply the fact that the material provided by the Maya episode and those of the other three human protagonists was treated by artists in a variety of ways. Conceivably there were illustrative cycles of such length and completeness that all aspects of the legend could be presented in their proper chronological sequence. Most often the theme was summed up in the single scene of the decease. In that case the late artists usually preferred expressive richness to narrative accuracy, and so added one or both of the key figures who should have appeared only in a later act. As we have seen, the Wu-t'ai Shan version reported by Ennin included "the figure of the Lady Maya swooning to the ground in anguish." She appears - with the greater dignity of an earlier period - as the single, non-monkish mourner in the strange Northern Ch'i relief of Cave V in the southern Hsiang-t'ang Shan group23. The designer of our stele omitted her because his cycle permitted her introduction at the proper moment later. He did, on the other hand, compress the time sequence arbitrarily by including the (for the Chinese, less interesting) figure of Maha Ka~yapa.

The small stele panel showing Maya in the act of embracing or swooning over the closed sarcophagus is to the best of my knowledge unique. The T'ang artist's instinct for three- dimensionality, setting the coffin on a sharply rising diagonal, has made her pose so unusual as to be at first sight difficult to explain. The costume and hairdresses of the ladies in this scene seem to represent the kind of compromise with actual court fashions found two generations or so later in the Japanese painting of Kichij6ten, with drifting girdle ends added to express the etherial nature of goddesses.

In treating the next scene, the Buddha's preaching from His opened sarcophagus, the stele version stresses the act of emerging literally; in the Tun-huang paintings Sdkyamuni is fully seen, and so presented with a more conventional dignity.

The stele's procession suffers more than any of the other episodes by comparison with the greater latitude and animation possible in painting. Reduced to its essentials, a litter with bearers, it seems to continue an ancient, secular design that had been rendered with infinitely more imagination in the Ku K'ai-chih "Admonitions" scroll. It is, at the same time, both like and superior to the Tun-huang banner scene of Queen Maya in her palanquin, done perhaps in the latter half of the ninth century, when the T'ang style at Tun-huang had lost much of its vitalityz4.

The cremation scene, with its energetic stokers, more distantly recalls another, earlier Chinese design, the burning house and fire-fighters of the Kansas City sarcophagus5s. The illustrative requirements of the two are so unlike that the comparison is perhaps chiefly useful

23 Mizuno and Nagahiro T., The Buddhist Cave-temples of Hsiang-t'ang-ssu, Kyoto, 1937, pl. 23 A. The composition is curi- ously like a Quattrocento Last Supper scene, with Maya in the isolated, foreground position of Judas. The unique prominence given the mourning mother makes one wonder whether the cave may not have been vowed by a Northern Ch'i empress who had known the same sorrow. If this were so, the most likely candidate would be Lady Li, the consort of the first emperor. When the latter's younger brother came to the throne in 561 as Wen Ch'eng Ti, he both raped the beautiful widow and brutally slew her remaining son, the Prince of T'ai-ytian. Lady Li, "a lover of Buddhism", became a nun, and survived both the Chou and Sui conquests. She would probably have been permitted to dedicate a memorial cave-temple at any time after Wen Ch'eng Ti's death in 568 (he had abdicated in 565). See the Pei Ch'i Shu, ix, p. 2a, and xii, p. lb.

24 Matsumoto, Tonk&-ga, pl. LXXIII, b; or Sir M. A. Stein, The Thousand Buddhas, London, 1921, pl. XXXVII. 25 L. Sickman and A. Soper, The Art and Architecture of China, Baltimore, 1956, pl. 52A.

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as a way of highlighting the stylistic gap between late Northern Wei and mature T'ang. The stele's air of bustle and sturdiness is obviously much better suited to its theme of action; yet there is just enough similarity in gestures and body poses to hint at a possible continuity.

The crowning relief of Mount Sumeru summarizes the salient features of the kind of fantastic description that is given in the Sanskrit collection of "Long Sermons", the Dirghdgama, which was translated into Chinese around 400 at Ch'ang-anz6. The familiar hour-glass shape is crowned by the palaces of Indra's heaven. The extent of the celestial city is suggested by mini- ature walls running back on reverse perspective lines. Of the three buildings in the foreground, those on left and right are shown as wood-framed halls with tiled roofs, in the pure Chinese style. The structure at the center - unfortunately damaged - looks like a two-storeyed masonry pagoda of a more hybrid design; the Buddhist Church was always anxious to redeem the traditional voluptuousness of life in Indra's realm by insisting that it revolved around a fervent worship of the Buddha.

Half-way up the world-mountain are the foothills of the Four Lokapalas, three of whom are shown seated on their respective peaks in the Indian prince's pose. The Dirghdgama account lingers over the mountain's staircase, fashioned of the Seven Treasures, with parapet walls and railings; lower, middle, and upper sections are mentioned, each narrower than the one below. The sculptor has turned these into a sweeping, spiral ramp. The tiny figures moving up and down probably owe their presence to the attention paid Mount Sumeru in an even more famous scripture, the Vimalakirti Sfitra: the text specifically mentions that the jewelled staircase is used by gods who descend to Jambudvipa, and by mortals mounting to heavenz7.

The frames between the stele's relief panels are filled with a fine-line ornamentation. The wider surfaces contain a clearly drawn floral rinceau, with blossoms facing alternately up and down. A similar, though somewhat richer pattern occurs on the inner frame of the stone epitaph-lid of the T'ang general Ch'iian Nan-sheng, a north Korean renegade who died loaded with honors in 67928. The stele's narrower frames are decorated with a simple, repeating motif, which might be described as a puffy cloud-scroll with a hanging tail. Here a convenient parallel exists with the early eighth century epitaph-lid of a Lady Tu-ku, wife of the court official Yang Chih-i, with whom she was buried. The latter stone, and the corresponding ones done for Yang himself in the same style - he died in 716 - show throughout the greater floridity and sophisti- cation that began to overtake T'ang decorative art after the Empress Wu's reign had closedz9

It may be noted in conclusion that the Japanese party found a second Parinirvana stele, very similar in style and iconography but lacking its top, and undated, among a collection housed in one of the prefectural buildings of An-i-hsien, just southeast of I-shihso. Here only the bottom two wide panels are preserved (and apparently only the front and ends are carved). Both the preaching group and the scene of the decease include the figure of Maya, occupying the con-

26 No. 545 in Nanjio's catalogue; transl. in 412-13 under the title Ch'ang A-han Ching by Buddhaya'as; Dai.Zkyj, I, no. I, xviii, p. I14.

27 Matsumoto, op. cit., pp. 157-58 quotes the relevant passage, from Daizjkyj, XIV, p. 555. 28 Reproduced in the Honan Provincial Museum's album of rubbings, Ho-nan Chin Shih Chih T'u, I, 1933. Ch'iian's bio-

graphy appears in Hsin T'ang Shu, cx. 29 Reproduced in Ku-tai Chuang-shih Hua-wen Hsiian-chi, Hsi-an, 1953, pls. 55, 57. Yang's biography appears in Chiu T'ang

Shu, lxii. 30 Shansai Koseki-shi, pp. 113-14.

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spicuous positions that on the I-shih stone were given to Cunda and to Mahd Kdayapa, respectively. Just enough remains of the third tier to prove that it was divided into left and right panels. The right side shows what look like the legs of the pallbearers, and the left apparent traces of the coffin and Maya. Obviously the iconography of the cycle was far from inflexible, even in the same region, and during (what the Japanese take to be) the same period. From a quite different standpoint it is interesting to note that the first-named donor bore as his given name the Chinese equivalent of Bhaisajyaguru, i.e. Yao-shih.

CHINESE AND JAPANESE GLOSSARY

An-i-hsien ~ , Choh6ji : R t y

Ch'ang A-han Ching & pJ & Ch'tian Nan-sheng _ Ennin Hibiya Takeo H UIA~5t Ho-nan Chin Shih Chih T'u " ?

n ~j M I-shih-hsien

,g Ku-tai Chuang-shih Hua-wen Hsiian-chi - g g g g

Li, Lady YS Matsumoto Eiichi @ g g-- Mizuno Seiichi 7Kf -- Mochizuki Shinka ,f

Nagahiro Toshio : Nait6 Torajir6 N) -5 ~ J Omura Seigai 7k Pao-ch'ing-ssu 7 Shansai Koseki-shi LI -

. Shan Yu Shih K'e Ts'ung-pien gIj 7Mi Shina B!utsu-shi, Chjso-hen JiTC PZ- Tenrytzan R Tonko-ga no Kenkyz7 R ) A Tu-ku, Lady gr T'ai-ytian, Prince of Jg 5 T'an-ching -- Wen Ch'eng Ti ?Zfq & Yang Chih-i f A -

169


Article Contentsp. 159p. 160p. [161]p. [162]p. 163p. 164p. 165p. 166p. 167p. 168p. 169

Issue Table of ContentsArtibus Asiae, Vol. 22, No. 1/2 (1959), pp. 1-198Volume InformationFront Matter [pp. 1-7]Note sur une stele indienne d'epoque Pla decouverte a Ayudhy (Siam) [pp. 9-14]The Riddle of the Bottle-Horn [pp. 15-22]Seventy Years of Ceylon Archaeology [pp. 23-40]Carved Images of Jiz as a Priest in Late Fujiwara and Early Kamakura Interpretations [pp. 41-47]Notes Iraniennes IX. Une Coupe sassanide scne de chasse, de la Collection M. Foroughi [pp. 48-52]An Irruption of Gothic Style Forms into Indo-Islamic Architecture [pp. 53-58]Two Dated Images from the Shan States [pp. 59-63]Sarmatian Gold Collected by Peter the Great: - VII; The Demidov Gift and Conclusions [pp. 64-67+69-78]Pre-Pottery and Jmon Pottery Relationships on the I.C.U. Campus, Tky [pp. 79-91+93-94]Treasures from the Songyimsa Temple in Southern Korea [pp. 95-112]The g Vedic Myth of the Craftsmen (The bhus) [pp. 113-120]A Colossal Eleven-Faced Kuan-yin of the T'ang Dynasty [pp. 121-137]Examples of Pattern Dissolution from the Archaeological Specimens of Anyang [pp. 138-142]A Landscape Attributed to Wen Cheng-ming [pp. 143-152]A Sinhalese Hero Stone [pp. 153-155+157-158]A T'ang Parinirva Stele [pp. 159-169]A Bronze Dagger-Axe [pp. 170-178]A Tibetan Classification of Buddhist Images, According to Their Style [pp. 179-187]A Group of Circular Bronze Objects of the Late Chou Period [pp. 188-192]Reflections on "Style" [pp. 193-198]Back Matter

soper_a t'ang parinirvana stele

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