Latter Days of the Law:
Images of Chinese Buddhism by Marsha Weidner
Reviewed by Wang Eugene Yuejin
Art Bulletin
Vol.78 No.3
Pp.556-559
Sep 1996
COPYRIGHT 1996 College Art Association of America Inc.
The Chinese art-historical canon has had a checkered life in this
country. The field has been through dramatic shifts in the throes of
coming into being. Early art historians, for example, slighted
literati painting. For Ernest Fenollosa, Chinese art practically
ended after the Song dynasty (960-1279). He abhorred the "amateur"
paintings of the subsequent periods.(1) Ludwig Bachhofer, Heinrich
Wolfflin's student, dismissed literati painting from the 14th to the
18th centuries as "poor and anemic" products of the
"dilettantes."(2) Even Sherman Lee initially questioned whether Dong
Qichang (1555-1636) was competent enough to paint, though he later
recanted.(3) It took a few generations of art historians to get over
this early bias. But soon there arose a new art-historical orthodoxy
that clung to the gospel according to Dong Qichang, the towering
aesthete and arbiter of taste who once and for all canonized the
development of Chinese art with, to borrow phrases from Fredric
Jameson, an "ultimate privileged" "interpretive master code."(4)
Underlying Dong's schema are a preoccupation with the learned codes
of idiomatic brushworks in the name of the past, smug disdain toward
professional academicism or craftsmanship, increasing reification of
landscape as an escapist mental universe in the form of dry
abstraction, and, finally, an art-historical lineage with Dong
himself as the ultimate end of history.
In all fairness, the acceptance of Dong Qichang was a hard-won
victory by students of Chinese art in this country in their effort
to overcome some of the earlier prejudices and apparent lack of
cultural understanding. It was, after all, no simple task to bring
taste around from the visually seductive pictures executed by
professionals to the pedantically plodding and deliberately
unappealing paintings of "amateurs" who fetishized brushwork at the
expense of pictorial design. The turnaround was also
circumstantially facilitated by the relatively large quantities of
available Ming and Qing paintings in this country, which allowed art
historians easy access to the materials, especially in times of
political strain between China and the West. Moreover, the
art-historical narrative according to Dong Qichang was, and still
remains, valid in supplying us with one logical structure of meaning
to encompass otherwise diverse and unordered art-historical
phenomena. "All art-historical master narratives," as W. J. T.
Mitchell puts it, are a compound of half-truths and
oversimplifications that nevertheless has a certain power to frame
the production and reception of art."(5)
The problem is that the master narrative has congealed into an
orthodoxy at the expense of alternative versions of history and to
the exclusion of paintings that do not fit into it. Richard Barnhart
first sounded the alarm that "we have been ... thoroughly
brain-washed by a handful of critics" and have buckled under "the
imposition of arbitrary intellectual critical structures, like Tung
Ch'ich'ang's theory." "It is time," says Barnhart, "to consider
their pervasive and destructive influence" and to rethink "our
continued utilization of these biases."(6)
Barnhart's call is finally heeded after nearly two decades.
Revisionist art histories are being written. Recent years have seen
shifts of focus from the elitist canon to unsigned monuments, and
from literati aestheticism to sociopolitical contextualism. Latter
Days of the Law: Images of Chinese Buddhism, 850-1850 appears
against this backdrop. The catalogue gathers into one massive volume
eighty-three post-Tang Buddhist pictures from some thirty-three
museums and collections, most of them marginalized by the reigning
art-historical canon. The authors of the introductory essays are
explicit about their revisionist stance. The catalogue, as Marsha
Weidner declares in the introduction, is "a challenge" to "a body of
well-established ideas about the development of Buddhism, Buddhist
history in China, and Chinese art history" (p. 36). Julia Murray in
her essay, "The Evolution of Buddhist Narrative Illustration in
China after 850," is more specific:
Although some genteel connoisseurs professed not to value Buddhist
narrative illustrations and rarely wrote about them, sheer numbers
indicate that there was considerable demand for such works....
However, our understanding of this market is still limited, largely
because the rarefied interests of Dong Qichang and other highly
sophisticated critics have shaped later accounts of the art of this
period.... Dong Qichang's indifference led us too hastily to
attribute narrative illustration to a lowerclass or populist milieu
(pp.142-44).
This is a well-taken point, though Murray may not actually need to
defend the Buddhist narrative scrolls by subscribing to the
traditional downplaying of lower-class populism. On the other hand,
that the historical value of the latter needs apology at all in our
field is symptomatic enough of the reigning canonic taste whose
pressure Murray tries to resist.
There is a catch here about targeting Dong Qichang. We seem to be
trapped in an antinomy. On the one hand, there appears to be a
conflict between Dong Qichang and a body of paintings -- call it
Buddhist art -- such as some of those described in the entries in
this catalogue; on the other hand, we know that Dong was deeply
involved with Buddhism. He had started copying the Diamond Sutra
when he was nineteen even before he took to painting.(7) The
catalogue features works by Ding Yunpeng, known for his image of
lohans (saints or Buddha's disciples appointed to witness
Buddha-truth and save the world). Dong actually praised Ding's lohan
paintings by writing inscriptions on them,8 a fact sufficiently
acknowledged in the catalogue (p. 361). He had nothing against
Buddhism or "Buddhist art," which for the post-Tang periods is
really a makeshift label attached to an assortment of widely
different paintings that otherwise have no business being lumped
together. Only certain ways of painting Buddhist images irked Dong,
such as painting lohans as dragon-subjugating, wind-riding
supernatural beings with the appearance of ghost-demons and
immortals (pp. 76-77). Dong Qichang's exclusiveness resides in his
uncompromising evolutionist schema and his distinct art-historical
vocabulary, which predisposes his followers to certain kinds of
paintings those that make up his schematic art-historical narrative.
It enshrines those who fit it and expels those who do not.
The problems confronting revisionism are therefore not to be framed
as Buddhism versus secular literatism, or landscape versus figure
painting, professionals versus amateurs. A more pressing concern is
how to deal with a type of painting not amenable to the Dong
Qichangesque vocabulary, that is, painting unsusceptible to a
discourse preoccupied with the priority of brushwork, with rich
referentiality to ancient masters enshrined by Dong, with certain
distinctively privileged formal traits such as "bland" (pingdan),
and above all, with the ever-mystifying and volatile notion of
"nature."
The value of the artworks is relative to, and contingent upon, the
larger art-historical narrative and discursive setting to which they
belong.(9) There is no question that the works in this catalogue are
not a good argument for the literati narrative. Some of the
paintings are in "poor taste" if we see them through the Dong
Qichang lens, yet they may score better points in other contexts. To
argue for them and to install them in the art-historical pantheon is
to discover those other contexts and narratives. Cataloguing
neglected works does not automatically make them remain on our
art-historical menu -- though doing so goes a long way toward that,
rather, it is how we string them into larger narratives that makes
them endure and demands further art-historical attention.10 Since
the Dong Qichang narrative obviously does not admit them, their fate
hinges on finding alternative narratives. This appears to be what
the authors of the volume attempt to do.
Weidner's essay, "Buddhist Pictorial Art in the Ming Dynasty
(1368-1644): Patronage, Regionalism, and Internationalism," redraws
the art-historical map of the period. While stating, with an ironic
overtone, that the cultural dominance of the affluent eastern Yangzi
River region was such that, as recounted in modern surveys, its
history of painting is virtually the history of later Chinese
painting" (p. 67), she shows an alternative history that embraces
the artistic activities in the Beijing court and the provincial
centers in the west and northeast. This means a broadening of our
canonic scope to include wall paintings decorating Buddhist temples
which were often found distasteful to the late literati palate. This
canonic expansion necessarily entails a set of new issues such as
"the institutional settings in which Buddhist liturgical and
didactic paintings were used" and the function of paintings in
tandem with "sculpture and textiles in specific architectural
contexts" (p. 63). Weidner's study of Buddhist monasteries as venues
for image-making yields some startling insights: as patrons of
Buddhist art, "eunuchs, monks, and women had something in common:
they were all outsiders, without access to the normal route to
governmental power through the examination system and office
holding." The Buddhist church offered them "an alternate arena" (p.
58). Weidner's unpacking of social interests and power relationships
woven into the pictorial fabric once again shows that a painting is
indeed "a deposit of social relationship."(11)
Weidner's exploration of the relationship between art and social
stratification is continued in Murray's essay. Murray challenges
elitism by exonerating what essentially was a popular medium for "
`middlebrow' tastes": the Buddhist narrative illustration. She
charts how the genre evolved from a proselytizing device to a means
of entertainment, and accordingly, from the mural to the portable
format. New interest in vernacular drama and fiction in late
imperial periods also fed into this transformation. With a group of
scrolls illustrating the theme of "Raising the Alms Bowl" as her
centerpiece, Murray correlates pictorial composition in scroll
formats with certain mise-en-scenes of Yuan-Ming drama to show how
the popular taste had saturated the genre. In so doing, she also
shows how the unfolding of a Buddhist narrative scroll, long
regarded as peripheral to the Chinese pictorial canon, may bring out
dramatic potentials in the format to an extent probably unobtainable
with a literati scroll. Murray also speculates on the possible
connection between the spread of such a vernacular art form and the
collecting impulse of the "families with modest means or limited art
experiences, as well as merchant families aspiring to elite status"
(p. 142). This, as she allows, awaits further substantiation.
Just as class looms large as an issue in this context, so does
ethnicity. Ethnic interactions were a fact of life in China after
DO. These interactions and tensions were registered in the Buddhist
art of the period. A familiar art-historical formulation of the
scenario would be a binary opposition between "internationalism" and
sinicization, which means charting the borrowing of motifs and
styles, tracing the routes of influence, identifying the foreign
prototypes and Chinese deviations. While this remains almost
indispensable, it is sterile in and of itself as an art-historical
narrative. Its denouement is all too predictable: sinicization is
inevitable. Patricia Berger's essay, "Preserving the Nation: The
Political Uses of Tantric Art in China," places the ethnic
interactions in a more provocative framework. The most interesting
part comes from her discussion of "foreignness" as a pictorial
rhetorical device. By the time of post-850 periods, Buddhist art had
already been sufficiently sinicized to have lost its "foreignness."
Alienness was retained in the esoteric streak in Buddhist art,
namely, tantric art. Berger shows us the surprisingly central role
played by this art in mediating and negotiating among competing
ethnic peoples. With the transmission of the bronze Mahakala (a
black or dark-blue deity with eight arms and three eyes) from the
Mongols to the Manchus, for example, the potential claim to the
dominance of China shifted accordingly. Perpetuated respectively by
the Tanguts (probably of Tibetan oxigin), Tibetans, Mongols, and
Manchus, esoteric tantric art in post-Tang China carried strong
ethnic overtones. As the art of an ethnic minority, it was foreign
to the majority that formed its audience. The choice of such a
"foreign" art was deliberately engineered for political gains, often
in a subtle way. Attempts were made to keep the "foreignness" alive
for designated purposes. A monument or a painting with
tantric-styled images, for instance, may carry a votive inscription
in three or four different languages, Chinese and non-Chinese. Each
version was adjusted to differ in its message from its counterparts,
thereby forcing the image to mean different things and to speak to
different audiences. Such a calculated multilingual artifice thrives
and plays on the idea of foreignness and judiciously discriminates
among audiences. It radically challenges our assumption of images as
carrying a fixed ontological status and stable references and will
serve to refuel the word-and-image discourse in a context undreamed
of elsewhere. Berger's sensitive explication of thangkas (Tibetan
Buddhist scroll paintings) also unveils the subtlety of different
ethnic styles coexisting in the same painting, thereby renewing our
interest in pictorial style as a rhetorical device.
Like Berger, who operates both within and beyond the confines of
internationalism and sinicization, Chun-fang Yu in "Guanyin: The
Chinese Transformation of Avalokiteshvara" tells a striking story of
sinicization. Avalokiteshvara, a compassionate bodhisattva, had been
traditionally represented in Buddhist countries as a young prince
who often sported a mustache. Centuries after its introduction to
China, the bodhisattva gradually underwent a "startling
transformation" (p. 151) and wound up being a goddess. In this case,
sinicization coincided with gender change. Yu's explanation is that
the popularization of feminine forms of Guanyin had to do with the
cult of new local deities and the apotheosis of ordinary human
traits in the Song dynasty (960-1279). Perhaps women are better
fitted to embody these traits, at least as perceived in medieval
China. Hence the transformation of Guanyin into a female deity. To
answer why this was so would involve larger assumptions; Yu's essay
is mostly devoted to documenting how it happened, and this
documentation yields some intriguing art-historical findings.
The shaping of an icon and iconography, as Yu shows us, is a dynamic
social process involving pilgrim's visions, tales of miracles,
popular texts (e.g., "precious volumes," baojuan), and the
association of an icon with a particular site. The plot thickens
when iconography is tied in with pilgrims, visions: "what a pilgrim
saw in a vision could be the basis for a new iconography, and
conversely, how the deity was depicted in contemporary iconography
might also predispose and condition how pilgrims would perceive
Guanyin in their visions" (p. 159). This is an art-historical
chicken-and-egg question, and we may do well to keep Yu's
dialectics. The dynamics continue beyond the stage of iconographical
formation. The Guanyin with a thousand hands and a thousand eyes is
a received icon rooted in esoteric Buddhist scriptures. The Chinese
popular reception of such an icon is often startlingly radical, as
evidenced in the popular narrative of Miaoshan Guanyin. Miaoshan is
the young woman who cuts off her arms and gouges out her eyes to
help cure the illness of her father the king. Deeply moved, the king
converts to Buddhism and vows to restore Miaoshan to the "fully
handed and fully eyed" condition (p. 162). The popular narrative
transposes Confucian filial piety into Guanyin's iconography to such
an extent that the latter is completely drained of its original
import. One wonders whether the raison-d'etre of an enduring
iconographic feature does not, in fact, lie in its susceptibility to
constant projections by its audience.
The lohan image is another such case, treated in Richard Kent's
essay,"Depictions of the Guardians of the Law: Lohan Paintings in
China." Various values have been attached to lohan images, which
range "from mishapen grotesques to seemingly debonair literati" (p.
183). They may be Chan patriarchal portraits in disguise or Taoist
immortals in masquerade. Kent is judicious in discriminating between
formats -- large, colored paintings and those executed in ink
without color (baimiao) in smaller formats, and between the "exotic
and fantastic" type and the "ordinary and decorous." However, a deep
tension underlies his interpretation of these types: a tension
between spirituality as the ultimate key to all the iconographical
puzzles and a historicizing sensibility to sociopolitical
contingencies. This is best exemplified in his discussion of Guanxiu
and Ding Yunpeng. The grotesqueness of Guanxiu's lohans is explained
as a way "to challenge the viewer to confront issues central to
Buddhist thought: the delusive nature of external appearances"; in
"their sagehood hidden beneath an appearance of grotesqueness,
Guanxiu's lohans would seem to urge the viewer to see with a more
embracing discernment" (p. 190). Kent also believes that "no writers
refer to the style of Guanxiu's lohans as having had any political
overtones" (p. 199). To this, ironically, a direct reply would have
come from the late Max Loehr, commonly regarded -- and maybe a bit
crudely caricatured -- as an arch-formalist avowedly skeptical of
the impact of external social factors in shaping artistic style:
There is a richness of experience,
imagination, and vision here that is not sufficiently
acknowledged by an insistence on the
ugly, grotesque or repellent appearance
of these types. Dating from 880, they are
the creation of a Ch'an monk who was
thirteen or so when, in 845, the Buddhist
church in China went through its worst
ordeal. Growing up in a monastic
environment, even a boy must have been aware
of, and in some way affected by, that
disaster. Perhaps the importance of Arhat
(lohan) images in the later ninth century
had to do with the traumatic experience
of the persecution of 845(12).
Kent reads Ding Yunpeng's lohans in the same vein: "Could not Ding
Yunpeng have been moved to create these far more somber lohan
compositions out of a sense that rendering the lohans in a figure
style ... celebrated for its elegance was no longer appropriate in
grim times when near chaos threatened the entire civil bureaucracy?"
(p. 200). One wonders why Kent denies such a shrewd insight to
Guanxiu.
The authors of the volume are mostly unsnared by the "trap" of
spirituality. So-called Chan/Zen painting is among those most
susceptible to mystification. A diverse collection of paintings
acquired by Japanese monks in China in the 13th and 14th centuries
has traditionally been labeled "Chan." The West has long been
enamored of such painting. Weidner finds this labeling "arguable"
and refuses to compromise with such an ahistorical imposition by
some modern Western scholars to see "a distinct tradition" that was
not there (p. 40). In this, she forcefully vindicates Loehr's
oft-unheeded critique of art-historical fabrication and
mystification of "Chan paintings."13 In a similar strain, Murray
finds that "Buddhist narrative illustration came to serve new
purposes that range far beyond its original function of helping to
explain an alien doctrine,, and that "later Buddhist narrative
illustration would also evolve to fulfill purposes that are not
always purely "religious," (p. 144). Berger's account of the Qing
imperial involvement with Tibetan and Tibetanized Mongolian Buddhist
lamas reveals, to an astonishing degree, how the selection of lama
reincarnations was from the beginning deeply enmeshed in political
circumstances. This was epitomized in the control of "the notorious
golden urn from which slips of paper with the names of candidates
dates for reincarnation as prominent lamas were drawn" (p. 112).
In addition to challenging the traditional neglect of
professionalism sketched earlier, Weidner also questions the biased
consensus that posta-850 Buddhism and Buddhist art are in decline.