Painting Faith: Li Gonglin and Northern Song Buddhist Culture by An-Yi Pan (review)

124 Journal of Chinese Religions Painting Faith: Li Gonglin and Northern Song Buddhist Culture AN-YI PAN. Sinica Leidensia, vol. 77. Leiden: Brill, 2007. xxiv, 396 pages. ISBN 978-90-04-16061-3. €146.00, US$217.00 hardcover. An-yi Pan’s impressively researched book argues that an amalgam of Chan, Huayan, and Pure Land Buddhism was of central importance in the life and paintings of the great Northern Song 北宋 artist Li Gonglin 李公麟 (c. 1049-1106). Although Li has been more thoroughly studied in the West than most other Chinese painters, his extensive involvement with Buddhism has received little attention, an oversight that Pan attributes to a “Confucian” bias in the primary sources and on the part of modern scholars.15 The book aims to determine “the nature of his Buddhist convictions, and of their effect on his art” (p. 1), and it ends by asserting that “bodhisattva faith” was “the quintessence of Li’s painting ethos” (p. 287). Faced with the absence of much direct evidence for his hypothesis that Li painted to express his Buddhist beliefs, Pan builds his case along two lines of investigation. First he reconstructs the eclectic Buddhist community in the Longmian Mountains 龍眠山 region of Anhui 安徽, where Li spent his youth and early adulthood. Pan provides capsule biographies for several noted clerics, as well as summaries of their favored doctrines and practices, and speculates that Li would have been familiar with them. He then analyzes two of Li’s major painting subjects, Longmian Mountain Villa (Longmian shanzhuang tu 龍眠山莊圖) and The White Lotus Society Picture（Bailian she tu 白蓮社圖） based on copies that preserve the compositions of the lost original paintings and the inscriptions written for them by people who knew Li. Pan also briefly discusses Li’s other paintings of Buddhist subjects listed in the Northern Song imperial catalogue Xuanhe huapu 宣和畫譜 (1120), for which not even copies or textual descriptions survive. Unable to analyze them directly, Pan lays out the “historical 15. Pan quotes Agnes Meyer’s 1923 book as representative of modern scholarship on Li Gonglin (Chinese Painting as Reflected in the Thought and Art of Li Lung-mien, 1070-1106, New York: Duffield and Company) (p. 4). His complaint that art-historians focus on literati painting is belied by a profusion of recent books on Buddhist art; e.g., Stanley K. Abe’s Ordinary Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Sarah E. Fraser’s Performing the Visual: The Practice of Buddhist Wall Painting in China and Central Asia, 618-960 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), Angela F. Howard’s Summit of Treasures: Buddhist Cave Art of Dazu, China. (Trumbull, CT: Weatherhill, 2001); Amy C. McNair’s Donors of Longmen: Faith, Politics, and Patronage in Medieval Chinese Buddhist Sculpture (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007); Ning Qiang’s Art, Religion, and Politics in Medieval China: The Dunhuang Cave of the Zhai Family (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2004); Eugene Y. Wang’s Shaping the Lotus Sūtra: Buddhist Visual Culture in Medieval China (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2005); Marsha Weidner’s edited volumes Latter Days of the Law: Images of Chinese Buddhism, 850-1850 (edited by Weidner et al. Lawrence, KS: Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas; Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1994) and Cultural Intersections in Later Chinese Buddhism (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2001); and Dorothy C. Wong’s Chinese Steles: Pre-Buddhist and Buddhist Use of a Symbolic Form (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2004). Book Reviews 125 and religious background Li would have had to keep in mind when creating these paintings” (p. 115). Painting Faith is a rearranged and expanded version of Pan’s 1997 University of Kansas dissertation, “Li Gonglin’s Buddhist Beliefs and his Lotus Society Picture: An Iconographic Diagram of the Bodhisattva Path,” and retains profuse references to texts in the Taishō Tripiṭaka and 20th-century scholarship on Buddhism, predominantly in Chinese and Japanese. One major addition is a new chapter analyzing Li’s depiction of his estate in the Longmian Mountains, introduced to bolster Pan’s argument that Li used painting as the medium to express his Buddhist faith. Drawing heavily (with acknowledgement) on...