Notes
293 Notes Introduction 1 My use of the word “allegory” is similar to how it is construed in Walter Benjamin’s writings, especially in his Origin of German Tragic Drama (1927). As Bainard Cowan explains, it is a kind of experience that arises when one realizes the transitoriness of things and the impermanence of the world; in allegory the world ceases to be purely physical and becomes an aggregation of signs (“Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Allegory,”110). 2 Art historians have been grappling with the daunting task of retrieving the original meanings of visual objects since the beginning of the discipline in the late nineteenth century.The debate is still very much on the minds of leading art historians of our time. See, for example,Thomas Crow,“The Practice of Art History in America.” 3 My argument has benefited from Alfred Gell’s anthropological theory of art, in particular his characterization of art as a social agent (Art and Agency, 5–11), as well as the rapidly growing scholarship on visual culture (see, for example, James D. Herbert,“Visual Culture/Visual Studies”). 4 This approach has been taken up by a number of recent monographs on Chinese Buddhist art. See, for example, Eugene Y. Wang, Shaping the Lotus Sutra, xix–xx. Although the term is not used explicitly, Stanley Abe’s study from 2002 also advocates a critical shift from “art”to “image”(Ordinary Images, 3–4). 5 See, in particular, Robert H. Sharf’s provocative critique in his Coming to Terms of Chinese Buddhism, 1–27. 6 See, for example, Stephen F. Teiser’s The Scripture of the Ten Kings; and Stephen Bokenkamp’s discussion of the notion of rebirth in Ancestors and Anxiety, 7–20. For seminal works on Indian Buddhism, see the various articles collected in Gregory Schopen’s Bones, Stones, and Buddhist Monks. 7 Although now situated in Xinjiang Autonomous Region of modern China, examples from the Buddhist cave temples of the Kuqa region (dating from the third century onward) are treated in this book as a distinct tradition of Central Asia. 8 The emphasis on the religious function of Buddhist art has been a recurrent theme in many recent works on Chinese Buddhist art. See, for example, Marylin Martin Rhie’s Early Buddhist Art of China and Central Asia, Abe’s Ordinary Images, Dorothy Wong’s Chinese Steles, and Amy McNair’s Donors of Longmen. 9 Jorinde Ebert, Parinirvāna; and Miyaji Akira, Nehan to Miroku no zuzōgaku. For more recent critiques on iconography as a viable method of inquiry in art history, see the essays in Brendan Cassidy, Iconography at the Crossroads, and Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson,“Semiotics and Art History.” 10 For a further discussion on the development of Buddhist studies in the West, see the introduction to Donald S. Lopez Jr., Curators of the Buddha. As Lopez remarks, “Buddhist Studies has thus been to a great degree a history of master texts, dominated by the scholastic categories it seeks to elucidate, what Said has called a ‘paradigmatic fossilization’ based upon ‘the finality and closure of antiquarian or curatorial knowledge’” (Curators of the Buddha, 7; the quote by Said is from his essay “Orientalism Reconsidered,”Race and Class 27.2 [1985]: 5, 14). 11 Ebert’s argument about the Roman origin of the reclining form is a case in point (Parinirvāna, 66). Miyaji also makes similar observations regarding the earliest forms of Maitreya in India art, which he believes were appropriated from the iconography for the Hindu deity Brahmā (Nehan to Miroku, 214). 12 Miyaji, Nehan to Miroku, 11. Notes for pp. 4–10 294 Notes for pp. 10–14 13 Since the 1950s, there have been a number of article-length studies devoted to examining nirvana images from China, including: Alexander C. Soper, “A T’ang Parinirvana Stele”; Yasuda Haruki, “Tōdai Sokuten ki no nehan hensō”; He Shizhe, “Dunhuang Mogaoku de niepan jingbian”; Hirano Kyōko, “Chūgoku hokuchōki no nehanzu”; Li Jingjie, “Zaoxiang bei de niepan jingbian”; and Hsueh-man Shen, “Pictorial Representations of the Buddha’s Nirvāna in Chinese Relic Deposits.” 14 This is Creighton Gilbert’s criticism of the kind of iconological studies championed by Erwin Panofsky. Cited in Michael Ann Holly, Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History, 164. 15 This model is still perpetuated by Lokesh Chandra’s multi-volume Dictionary of Buddhist Iconography, the most ambitious specimen of its kind in recent decades. 16 This reading of the pictorial...
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