Asian Art and Architecture: Art & Design 382/582

209 Maitreya Old Sila 6th - 7th c

210 Avalokitesvara Old Sila 6th - 7th c

218 Kudara Kannon Horyu-ji (Japan) Old Sila 6th - 7th c

244 Buddha cave temple Sokkuram Unified Sila c 774

211 Horyu-ji Nara Asuka 552 - 645

212 Goju no to, Horyu-ji Nara Asuka 552 - 645

213 Kondo, Horyu-ji Nara Asuka 552 - 645

220 Heavenly Musician Nara Asuka 552 - 645

214 Tamamushi Shrine Nara Asuka 552 - 645

215 Bodhisattva’s Sacrifice Nara Asuka 552 - 645

217 Yumedono Kannon Nara Asuka 552 - 645

219 Miroku Nara Asuka 552 - 645

Buddhism reached Korea through the medium of Chinese culture of the Six Dynasties period. Monks traveled, texts and images traveled, and image makers. Chinese image makers went to Korea, Korean image makers to China. "[N]o full understanding ofChinese acomplishments in the sixth and seventh centuries can be had without study of Korean and Japanese materials of about that time," Lee says. And he intends us to recognize that the synthetic vision of Chinese art of the time is assembled to an extent by means of interpolating Korean and Japanese art of the time as a variation on the Chinese.

The way my first guide to the art of Buddhism, LeRoy Davidson put it–on the basis of Alfred Salmony’s teaching in a tradition stretching back to the turn of the century–Korean art was modeled on the Chinese, but on a delay of about 50 years. And to some extent they knew what they sopke of. Chinese styles did hit and "influence" these provincial satalites who looked to China the greatest cultural mass for the gravity of its vision.

But that view, which dominated the first three-quaters of this centuri’s scholarship, misses an important aspect of the story, since there is very little in Japan or Korea that could be mistaken for Chinese or vice versa. The fact is, however much they relied on Chinese models, these were independent traditions with thier own models of excellence and their own traditions of craft. And indeed, in their own languages, their own Buddhism.

Buddhism entered Korea during the Three Kingdoms Period (57 BCE - 668 CE), arriving officially in Koguryo in 372, Paekche in 384 and Old Silla in 528. A glance at the map reveals this to be a slow geographic progression from the Chinese border southward. The slowness of this movement reflects the political nature of the spread and the significant local resistance to this foreign ideology. Buddhism was spread to Japan first by the Koreans of Paekche and then from China as well, during the Tang. In Korea Confucianism came in as the philosophy of state and Buddhism as the religion of the state. And quickly enough the Six Dynasties style, that carried in the first Buddhist imagery, was swept away by the International Tang.

Buddhism came to Korea and Japan, not through religious evangelicism, but as part of a package of Chinese cultural and political forms embodying Chinese assertion of its cultural and political power. Korea’s history and the history of its art was continually affected by Chinese foreign policies and so its armies. From the sixteenth century on, Japan’s commercial and imperial ambitions led to their invasions as well. One measure of the great devestation these invasions wrought is the destruction of most of the Buddhist art of Korean history. Though certertainly not all.

It is clear from the imagery that survives that the Buddhism that predominated here is Mahayana.

209 Maitreya Paekche (?) Old Sila period 6th - 7th c

Gilt Bronze 30"

This is one of only two large great bronzes to survive from the early period. It is from Old Silla or Paekche. This is Silla before it unified the Penninsula under its power. It is made in the "Norther Wei style" according to Lee. That is his Archaic & Elongated styles, c 450 - 535. See Lee 200-205 (The other is in the Northern Qi Style, that is, equivalent to the Columnar, cf Lee 208. And it has an almost identical twin, made of red cedar, at Koryu-ji in Japan, which was probably made in Korea. And in this case the imagery is very close to identical. Such is work that actually is of the same tradition, not just "related.")

12 5/8" bronze

Here in a rare survival is a what Lee sees as a "Chinese style" piece with its freely falling drapery and jewlery swags. Here the figure in the crown is a Buddha and so the Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara. To see the plainest evidence of the difference between contemporary Chinese and Korean styles one can look both back to eh Maitreya just seen (209) or to a work in Japan, below (218).

218 Kudara Kannon (Horyu-ji) Nara Old Sila mid-7th c

6’ 10" painted wood

When we consider the Horyu-ji’s Kudara Kannon as Korean we are not saying it is in Korean style, but following the tradition going back to its eariest useage, that it actually comes from Korea, as its name apparently states. Kudara was the Japanese name for the kingdom of Paekche, from which Japan received its first official transmision of Buddhist texts, monks and images. The image is over life sized at 6’ 10," and a bit difficult to see, due to the moteled effect of the surviving paint. But the subtlety of the rhythmically intertwining curves of the logus pedistal and the sinuous body and draperies above are closely allied to those we have just seen in the Paekche Maitreya. They make the "Chinese style" Avalokitesvara seem relatively simple and a little dull by comparison.

The Kannon’s right hand reaches out in the mudra of offering gifts, while the left holds a vessel with an inordinately elegant, elonged neck. Elongation is indeed one of the work’s and the style’s characteristics. Behind the subtly bending figure stands a great bodhi-tree-leaf-shaped halo, painted in handsome colors, which are unfortunately much flaked-off after thirteen centuries.

If indeed the Kudara Kannon, preserved with greag care in Japan’s oldest temple complex, is what it seems, it is an example of even a very large piece traveling. Though it was the little pieces in metal that survived most of the traveling, due to their compact size and hardness, the fact is many works were transported. The Buddhist world of Central and East Asia was a world of pilgrimage where acquiring prestigeous images in onl location for transportation to another was a well accepted process. Xuan-Zang (Hsuan-tsang) brought back Indian images to China, and Chinese images attributed with particular powers wer themselves sent from one place to another. The practice of sending images as gifts from one region or institution to another is still and important one in the Buddhist world, as we will see in our last lecture. (Korea and Japan are sometimes referred to as Northeast Asia as well) .

Plato’s Cave continued coverage of the imagery granite

If we jump up a century to the images of Sokkuram, the hand built "cave temple" at Kyung-ju, we see a work of the early Unified Sila that shows what Lee and the others mean by a general following of the Chinese transformation from Six Dynasties angularities and linearities to the International Gupta-Tang’s fully filled-out curving forms in sculpture. Lee’s Illustration shows the passage between the outer and inner chambers, leading to one great Buddha image. The work was originally sponsored by a government minister; it was completed in 744 CE, after his death. It is set high on a hill over looking the sea and facing outward toward the setting sun.

The entire construction is in granite, a hard stone which, because of its conglomerate structure will not take fine detail. Because of two total reconstructions undertaken by the Japanese at the beginning of the 20th century (1913-15 and 1920-23), the structure’s original entrance cannot be understood today, but the interior is intact. What we see here is the developed set of guardian and accompanying figures that appear on the elaborate altars or in the more complex paintings, but here all are lined up along the walls. The outer, rectangular entrance chamber contains guardians in low relief: The eight Demon Guardians and the Two (benevolent, vajrapani) Kings. The inner corridor contains the Four Kings (of the cardinal dirctions), standing on demons as we have seen as far back in Buddhist art as Bharhut. The corridor is vaulted, and at the entrance to the inner circular- domed chamber there is an Indian-looking torana.

The inner chamber is arranged around an 11’ image of Shakyamuni seated on a high lotus pedistal and carved in the round. Faced from the entrance it has a halo, carved on the wall behind it. This surrounding wall is composed of 15 more surrounding (parivara) images in relief. These are Indra, Brahma, three Bodhisattvas and the first 10 deciples (arhats) with shaven heads. The Bodisattvas are Manjusri, Samantabhadra and the Eleven-headed Guanyin, a rare figure in Korean Buddhism. Above in 10 small niches are small figures sculpt in the round. The seven, of the original ten, that remain are Vimalikirti and Bodhisattvas.

stone, 7.38 m

stone, 9.59 m

The Pulguksa monastery complex, nearby Sokkoram, contains a pair of characteristically Korean stupas, dedicated to the twin Buddhas who signify the preaching of the Lotus of the True Law, the foremost of first millenium Mahayana texts: Shakyamuni its preacher and Prabhutaratna, who has come to witness its preaching. The two stand on either side of the entrance to the main hall of the monastery, Shakyamuni’s (Sokka-t’ap) to the south, on the proper right facing out, and Prabhutaratna (Tabo-t’ap) on the left.

The Shakyamuni stupa is a seven and a half meter, four story tower on a double base, toped by a crowned, rounded mound. Around its base are eight lotus formed stones. It was likely intended to contain sharira (remains) of Shakyamuni itself. In its simplicity we recognize forms across East and Central Asia.

The Prabhutaratna stupa is a more freely decorative and even fanciful pile of stones, with stairways leading up its lower sides, open piers, elegant balustraes, eight sided levels and lotus shapes, closer to ten and a half meters. Its shapes are much more clearly peculiar to the Korean penninsula. The concept of a monastery with paired stupas at the entrance is known from Tang China across Korea to Japan.

Buddhism officially came from Korea to Japan with a royal embassay in 552 CE. The embassay from the King of Paekche, seeking a military alliance went directly to the Japanese Emperor, who assigned the new deities to one of his great clans as a trial. The embassay brought not only Buddhism in the form of monks, texts, and images, but also the means by which to expand Buddhism and East Asian cultural attainments in general. On the more general side, and most significantly, it included writing and Chinese culture, which were both essentially unknown in Japan before this time. On the Buddhist side it incuded image makers as well as texts and monks.

The individual charged with investigating the new religion became its greatest patron, Prince Shotoku Taishi, who soon established it through his growing royal power, as the state religion. This was a political event more than a spiritual one, but it did manage to insert the new religion, and the Chinese culture accompanying it, into a world previously self-contained and dominated by the national nature religion Shinto. Royalty embraced Chinese culture in writing and all sorts of other habits. The flowering of Buddhist art was carefully based upon Chinese and Korean patterns. So much so that many in the past have looked–as Lee does–to Japan as a model for what was then current in China and since lost.

The Asuka period begins with the introduction of Buddhism. Though Lee takes the conventional, and not wholely unreasonable, step of interpreting this imagery as a provincial Chinese expression, I will treat it as something else that he would not quarel with, and that indeed is a large part of his own presentation: as if it were simply Japanese. However much our American usage of English language culture is derivative from that Japan-sized island off the coast of Europe, it is also certainly our own. Phyllis Wheatly’s poetry and Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography are not merely secondhand expressions of English culture.

Houyu-ji (Horyu-temple) is the type site of the period. And it contains not only some of the first Buddhist structures built in Japan, but, it seems, the oldest wooden buildings to survive anywhere in the world. The temple was founded in 607 ce. Its form is the expectable one and certainly echos Chinese forms in their Korean incarnation, whether or not this echo is as exact a replica as Lee believes. Image, worship, and living quarters are spread in symmetrical arrangements within a closed cloister. The present gateway, kondo (golden hall) and stupa tower (to) were constructed [in the form of the original strucures they replaced] in 670. A fire in 1949 destroyed part of the Kondo, but it has been reconstructed in exact replica.

The symmetrical layout in the form of rectalinear halls ensconced in rectalinear cloisters oriented to the cardinal directions is resoultely Buddhist, and indeed as resolutely Chinese and even Indian in ultimate roots. Though we can also see such rectalinear architectural symmetry, oriented to the cardinal directions in many cultures outside Asia, and indeed we can see such in Japan’s much earlier indigenous Shinto culture itself, dating to centuries earlier, for instance in the shrines at Izumo (Lee 101) and Ise (Lee 102). Typical of Japan, and untypical of mainland East Asia is the asymmetry of the two main structures within the cloister.

The goju no to is the complex’s "five story tower." It is a stupa, standing on one side of the courtyard, balancing the Kondo (image hall) on the other. The whole is set up on a solar axis. This is equivalent to the Six Dynasties forumla for a monastic complex in China or Korea. Later in all three regions one gets an image hall on the central axis and twin towers preceeding it, to either side of the axis.

The goju no to stands on a stone base with stair cases and doorways on all four sides. It is a wood framed structure with plastered walls, set between its major beams. Its bracketed, oversailing eaves and walls are in a fashion imported from the mainland, and quite distinct from the highly-refined, pier-based architecture of preceeding Shinto structures which have survived to today, in precise replicas, for comparison (Lee 101-102). The design spreads out the weight of the great tiled roofs through its pillared frame. A enclosing porch was added in the 8th century. (The dragon encircling pillars of the upper story were added in the 17th c.)

The structure of the goju no to is a hollow frame. It was not intended for occupation. It is a stupa tower in essence, with the relic located at the base of its central inner pillar, rising from its base.

At Horyu-ji there was added, in the 8th century, a set of narrataive scenes on each side. The one on the ___ was the Parinirvana of the Buddha. The one on the _______ was the debate between Avalokitesvara and the ideal layman, Vimalakirti.

The Kondo (Golden hall) was the location for the major images, and so image worship in the complex. Here too there is the typically mainland form of the post and lintel carpentry structure, with a tile roof, on a stone basement. The kondo’s roofs are supported, like the goju no to’s by complex interlocking bracketing to support the oversailing rafters in a strikingly decorative and practical manner. There are stairways of entrance from each of the four directions.

On the interior the elaborately interlocked joinery architecture encorporates three centrally located altar platform with canopies in the ceiling. There is thus room for circumambulation as well as worship facing the images. The surrounding walls carry murals creating one great cosmic ritual situation for the intended imagery. Entering the kondo is entering a cosmic paradise, surrounded by their cosmic paradises. This is the hall partially destroyed by fire in 1949. In a tradition of reconstructing ritual buildings in precise replica, that goes back the Shinto traditions at Ise and other sites, this structure has been restored to a very close representation of its original form.

bronze 5’ 9" overall with 4’ figures

Tori Busshi’s Shaka Triad is the main image set from the kondo altar is inscribed with the date of its creation and even the name of its first generation in Japan, Korean artist. It is the largest bronze monument to survive from the seventh century Buddhist world. Lee calls Tori an artist of Chinese decent. The Japanese have long considered him to be a Korean. But art is cultural, not genetic. The style is the Korean style of the Six Dynasties model, out of which the Japanese will soon adapt their own.

In the center is Shakyamuni seated preaching: offering gifts with its right hand and signifiying fear not with its right. It was made two years after Shotoku Taishi’s death in his remembrance. Once again it is in the Elongated style. Lee sees this as the Northern Wei style of Longmen as transmitted by the LIang dynasty at Nanjing (502-577). Waterfall drapery covers the table of the altar upon which the Buddha sits. The great leaf shaped mandorla behind bears images of a halo surounded wavy, flame-line patterns, within which are seven seated Buddhas in meditation. To each side stands a Bodhisattva of closely coordinated forms. The images are idenfiable as Buddha and Bodhisattva in precisely the same ways as those in India half a millenium earlier: the ascetic monk in the center and the princely lay figures on the sides.

polychrome wood 20"

Here is one example of the heavenly musicians that decorate the walls of the Kondo, as painted figures fly above in Dunhuang and Ajanta. It is in carved wood, on a lotus base with scarves and flowers sailling above in a flat contrast to its fully rond modeling.

Laquer painting on wood 7’ 8"

The contemporaneous Tamamushi (jade beetle) Shrine’s miniature roof, supplied a model for the proportions and slope of the kondo. This miniature temple, which constructed to house a small metal Buddha, carries on its laquer walls some of the finest preserved examples of the first Buddhist paintings in Japan. Shrine itself is a wooden structure with metal fittings and a finly laquered surface.

Laquer (about) 1 1/2’

The panels of the Tamamushi shrine are up to a foot and a half in size. The paintings are in several colors of laquer on a black ground. The style is the flat, highly patterned forms of the Six Dynasties period on the mainland. The subjects are jataka tales. the example. Here we see, through simultaneous narrative, such as seen elsewhere, the Bodhisattva standing atop a profile crag, carefully placing his garment upon a tree before plunging, like a high diver, to his death below, where he is seen as a corpse being devoured by a mother tiger for the benefit of her two cubs. He has sacrificed himself for the tiger family, and even, through his suicide, preserved them from the negative karma of having to kill him themselves!

In style all the forms are in local color within compact outlines. The cliff is seen from the side as a set of interlocking patches which one can find in the relief sculpture of stone or most siginficantly of the cloth printing patterns by which much of the ancient worlds design forms circulated most conveniently. Also prominent in the style is the flexible line of the Chinese writing brush. Favorite Chinese painting motifs such as the bamboo of the landscape, the crags of the cliff and the streaming cloth of clothing are visible. The design corresponds to the Elongated style.

gilded wood 6’ 5"

The Kannon of the Yumedono (hall of dreams) at Horyu-ji is one of the best preserved of the time. It was long a secret image hidden away from public view and deterioration. Looking at it we can see some of the possible differences between the earliest Japanese and the previous Korean styles from which they derive. We may compare this with the Kudara Kannon in the same temple. They are both six foot wooden figures of standing Avalokitesvara (Ch. Guanyin). The early Japanese images are flatter, more four squar, solid figures than their suaver, more fluid Korean ancestors. Typical of their Chinese source is the flying serrated edge of their outlines. In the plankness of this outer edge Lee notes the very Japanese tradition of letting the material form show through the design. It its hands it h olds a wishing gem.

It is one of Lee’s most endearing characteristics that he shows us the role of the connoisseur of his training, telling us both how much he personally sees this as the perfect example of Chinese Six Dynsasties and how carefully he records the role of previous museum curators in recovering a preserving the work.

wood 5’ 2"

The last work from Horyuji is the Chugu-ji Miroku (Maitreya), an image from an auxiliary shrine. This seated figure seen in only its head in Lee, but fully in Plato’s cave, is a wooden example of the highly suave style seen in Korean Mytreya (209). This is a large wooden figure indicating the range of styles within even this one site. Both the figure’s subtlety and its sweetness are characteristics that will continue in the Japanese Buddhist tradition. This iconographic form is one shared with Korea only. We have already seen the pose of the royal ease and one hand raised to the chin in the Paekche Maitreya of more or less the same moment. The two hair lobes is a second Northeast Asian forumla used in this period for more or less exclusively for Shakyamuni as a Bodhisattva and for Miroku. (A loose variation of it can be seen also on the heavenly musician, figure 220.)