Empire of Emptiness: Buddhist Art and Political Authority in Qing China

Introduction: Raining Flowers

Introduction: Raining Flowers O great King, listen to how Your body will be adorned With the thirty-two signs Of a great being. Through proper honoring of stupas, Honorable beings, Superiors, and the elderly You will become a Universal Monarch, Your glorious hands and feet marked with [a design of] wheels. —Nâgârjuna, Precious Garland, trans. Jeffrey Hopkins In 1753, Hongli, the Qianlong emperor of the Manchu Qing dynasty, had himself painted into the role of Buddhism’s greatest layman, the Licchavi merchant Vimalakîrti (Plate 1). The artist, a court painter named Ding Guanpeng, took no chances with this important commission. He chose a composition that had been in use since as early as the fifth century to illustrate the sutra in which Vimalakîrti takes a starring role: the Vimalakîrti-nirdeßa (Teachings of Vimalakîrti). Like many other early illustrations of the story, Ding’s Bu’er tu (“Not Two,” or “Nonduality Picture”) seats the savant merchant Vimalakîrti on the right facing his visitor and partner in debate, Mañjußrî, the bodhisattva of wisdom. The topic occupying them is nonduality and the apprehension of emptiness. The moment in the story Ding gives us appears in the sutra’s seventh chapter, when a beautiful goddess, a longtime resident of Vimalakîrti’s house, appears and throws flowers over the gathered company surrounding Mañjußrî. These raining blossoms glide gracefully over the many spiritually advanced bodhisattvas who are present, but they stick conspicuously to everyone else. Most annoyed—and visibly so in Ding’s painting—is the Buddha’s disciple Çâriputra, who tries futilely to shake the flowers off. When the goddess asks what he and his monastic brothers are doing, he answers: “Goddess, these flowers are not proper for religious persons and so we are trying to shake them off.” The goddess said, “Do not say that, reverend Çâriputra. Why? These flowers are proper indeed! Such flowers have neither constructual thought nor discrimination. But the elder Çâriputra has both constructual thought and discrimination.”1 Shortly after this pointed and embarrassing exchange, Çâriputra (who plays the worrywort and butt of Vimalakîrti’s jibes throughout this often comical sutra) asks the goddess how, if she is such an advanced being, she finds herself still occupying the inferior body of a woman. Not wasting too many words, the goddess switches bodies with Çâriputra, leaving him aghast. In a brief but effective defense of the notion that all forms are impermanent, transitory, and illusory, she wryly asks: “Reverend Çâriputra, what prevents you from changing out of your female state?” And Çâriputra is forced to concede: “I do not know what to transform!” 1 Ding’s composition mirrors ancient and authoritative versions of the scene that underscore the theme of nonduality in a seemingly paradoxical way: by dividing everything neatly into twos. As was often the case in his practice, the painter creatively interprets a work already in the emperor’s collection, a handscroll that may have been done by the Jin-dynasty painter Ma Yunqing (who was himself inspired by the Northern Song painter Li Gonglin).2 Ding’s rendition is also complicated and enriched by his deployment of two or more disjunctive styles of representation.The combination of the emperor’s distinctive—and disturbingly present—face with the bland, anonymous faces and agitated, archaistic line that describes the garments of the gathered crowd, which casts the knowing viewer back to moments and monuments in Buddhism’s specifically Chinese past,3 ultimately hints at the dissolution of a different two—a mythic, Indian past (or, perhaps more aptly, a moment in the history of Chinese art) and a Qing-dynasty present—into one. The effectiveness of Ding’s painting depends, of course, on the text of the sutra, a text not provided for the viewer to consult but which ends famously by casting the usefulness of language into doubt. It is this culminating moment that Qianlong alludes to in his poetic inscription. Vimalakîrti and Mañjußrî have been discussing emptiness in a typically long, florid exchange. Offering an insightful summation, Mañjußrî seems to have captured the essence of it.The floor is now Vimalakîrti’s and, in a brilliant tour de force, he chooses to remain silent—a moment of speechless eloquence so profound that it has come to be called the “lion’s roar,” the moment when a bodhisattva reaches the tenth, final stage of development. Qianlong writes: Vimalak...