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

Notes

introduction 1 See entry on “stele” in The Macmillan Dictionary of Art, ed. Jane Turner (New York: Grove Dictionaries, 1996), 29: 615–621; and entry on “Stela,” Encyclopædia Britannica Online, http://search. eb.com/eb/article?eu=71370. 2 Édouard Chavannes, Six monuments de la sculpture chinoise, vol. 2 of Ars Asiatica (Paris & Brussels: Van Oest, 1914); Laurence Sickman and Alexander C. Soper, The Art and Architecture of China (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1956; 3rd ed. 1968), pp. 102–109, 112–124. 3 Sickman and Soper, The Art and Architecture of China, pp. 102–103. 4 For an overview of jinshixue, see Zhu Jianxin, Jinshixue (Shanghai : Shangwu chubanshe, 1933; reprint, Hong Kong: Shangwu, 1964). 5 Lothar Ledderose, “Rubbings in Art History,” in Catalogue of Chinese Rubbings from the Field Museum (Chicago: Field Museum of Natural History, 1981), pp. xxviii–xxxvi. 6 For example, the titles of stone inscriptions from 133 antiquarian works have been indexed in Shike tiba suoyin, comp. Yang Dianxun (Shanghai: Shangwu chubanshe, 1957). I would like to thank Albert Dien for sharing his unpublished paper, “Report on an Epigraphical Survey” (1974). 7 The validity in the use of the term “zaoxiangbei” is confirmed by an inscription, Zhang Baoluo deng zaoxiang ji, dated 549, which records the dedication of a stone stele with images (zao shi bei xiang), in Jinshi cuibian, comp. Wang Chang (1805; Beijing: Zhonghua shuju ed., 1985), juan 31. 8 Contrast, for example, the meticulous drawings of bronze vessels in Song and Qing imperial catalogues that attempt to represent the objects three-dimensionally; no such efforts were accorded to Buddhist carvings. 9 A native of Suzhou, Ye Changchi grew up in the literati environment of this southern city where publishing and book and art collecting flourished; apparently the author himself owned more than 8,000 items of rubbings in his private collection. 10 The three works by Wang Chang, Ye Changchi, and Ma Heng are much revered by Japanese sinologists and have been translated into Japanese with extensive annotations in Mizuno Seiichi, Tsukamoto Zenryû et al., Chûgoku sekkokugaku gairon, 2 vols. (Tokyo: Seishin shobo, 1978). 11 In conjunction with the East Asian Library of the University of California, Berkeley, which holds one of the largest collections of Chinese rubbings in the West, Lewis Lancaster of the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative is collaborating with Asian institutions in digitizing the rubbings. 12 For a discussion of the American collecting of East Asian art from the late nineteenth century through World War II, see Warren I. Cohen, East Asian Art and American Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). 13 The late Meiji to Taishō era saw the publication of the new edition of the Tripiπaka, along with major studies of Buddhism. notes Buddhist scholars such as Mochizuki Shinkō and Ono Genmyō meticulously gathered information on Buddhist image-making from Chinese textual sources. 14 Other studies on individual steles include: Sirén (1925, 1959), Charles Fabens Kelley (1927), Helen Fernald (1927, 1931, 1950, 1952), Alan Priest (1930, 1944), Laurence Sickman and Alexander C. Soper (1968), Eva I. Gatling (1957), Emmy C. Bunker (1965), Fong Chow (1965), Aschwin de Lippe (1965), and René Yvon Lefebvre d’Argencé, ed. (1974); see bibliography for full citations. 15 For an overview of the study of East Asian art in the twentieth century, see Cohen, East Asian Art and American Culture, pp. 155–199. 16 Wölfflin’s formalist theory is laid out in his Principles of Art History : The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art, trans. M. D. Hottinger (New York: Holt, 1932). 17 Loehr states his position in his Abby Aldrich Rockfeller Inaugural Lecture entitled “Buddhist Thought and Imagery,” delivered at Harvard University in 1961. Loehr’s application of formalist analysis is most influential in the study of ancient bronzes; his stylistic analysis of Chinese painting is controversial, and he did not approach the subject of Chinese Buddhist art. 18 Panofsky’s theory of iconology is explicated in his Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1939). 19 Early iconographical studies include Arthur Waley’s A Catalogue of Paintings Recovered from Tun-huang by Sir Aurel Stein (1931) and Matsumoto Eiichi’s Tonkōga no kenkyû (1937). Other works include J. Le Roy Davidson’s The Lotus Sutra in Chinese Art (1954), Alexander C. Soper, Literary Evidence for Early Buddhist Art in China (1959), Angela Howard’s The Imagery of the Cosmological Buddha (1986), and numerous...