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Faith, Politics, and Patronage in Medieval Chinese Buddhist

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Faith, Politics, and Patronage in Medieval Chinese Buddhist REVIEWS 247 chapters on childhood possession, one dealing with the positive phenomena of oracular possession, and another dealing with the malign invasion of children by demonic forces. This excellent book is well worth reading. Robert Mayer Oriental Institute, University of Oxford [email protected] Donors of Longmen: Faith, Politics, and Patronage in Medieval Chinese Buddhist Sculpture, Amy McNair (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007), 230 pp., $52/£33.50, ISBN 0-8248-2994-8 Longmen, located just outside of the city of Luoyang in Henan Province, is one of the most diverse and opulent expressions of Buddhist devotion in the world. Over a period of 250 years (from the late fifth century to the mid-eighth century) an astonishing 2,345 grot- toes were dug out of the side of a cliff and ornamented with approximately 100,000 indi- vidual statues accompanied by some 3,000 inscriptions, many in fine calligraphy admired to this day by art critics and aficionados (p. 1). Longmen has long attracted the attention of specialists in Buddhist art, drawn both to its beauty and to the plethora of art-historical puzzles it presents. In Donors of Longmen, Amy McNair focuses on the stories behind the images, revealed obliquely through inscriptions and the iconography itself. She leads us through the his- tory of Longmen, beginning with the first grotto, made in approximately 493 by an enter- prising monk named Huicheng, himself a member of the royal family, ostensibly to make karmic merit for his emperor and the state. Subsequent chapters focus, in chronological order, on the donors for other grottoes, or grotto complexes, concluding, in the final chap- ter with a curious set of 48 Amitābhas made by the powerful eighth-century figure Gao Lishi – one of the most famous eunuchs in Chinese history – for his friend and benefactor, Emperor Xuanzong. McNair provides perceptive observations on style and technique, noting the inten- tional distortion of one set of figures, whose noses ‘stand out rather wierdly’ when lit from above in the Metropolitan Museum of Art where they are now housed, whereas in their original setting, lit by a shaft of light from the cave opening, they would have appeared in perfect proportion to the rest of the faces (p. 48). Similarly, she notes that when the massive lokapāla and dvārapāla figures of the Great Viarocana Image Shrine are viewed from a distance, looking at them directly, we see that ‘the figures have been intentionally broadened, with an almost grotesque wideness to the hips and shoulders’, but that when they are viewed from the front of the shrine, with the viewer looking up, the proportions seem natural (p. 114). McNair also engages the considerable scholarship on the caves to propose her own solutions to questions of dating and iconographical identification. But as the title suggests, the greatest contribution of the book is its analysis of the donors: who they were and why they made images at Longmen. The results of this analysis carry implications not just for Longmen or Buddhist art history, but for our understanding of Buddhist devotion more generally. Central to the making of images at Longmen, and a theme that runs throughout the book, is the belief that through making an image one could earn merit that could then be transferred to a loved one to improve their fate in the cycle of rebirth. This, the foun- dation of Buddhist material culture, was a belief common to Buddhists from all walks of © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2007 248 BUDDHIST STUDIES REVIEW life, from empresses to artisans. As Kenneth Ch’en demonstrated some forty years ago, inscriptions from Longmen reveal that even the most erudite monks and nuns attempted to make merit for their deceased parents through the production of images.1 But McNair uncovers the political and social dimensions of image-making as well. For instance, while biographical details about Longmen’s first donor, the monk Huicheng, are scarce, McNair, through careful dating of the site and comparison with political events, shows that mak- ing the grotto would have been a good career move for an ambitious monk with court connections at a time when many were hostile to the emperor’s recent decision to move the capital to Luoyang. She further plausibly argues that not only did Huicheng mean for the central Buddha image to be taken as a representation of the emperor, but that after its completion, it was read that way by a loyal general who visited the grotto and left an inscription. Given the expense of the biggest projects at Longmen, only powerful figures at court would have had the means to support many of them, and court politics are never far from the history of the images on display there. McNair documents, for instance, the machina- tions of the Tang prince Li Tai to win the title of heir apparent away from his brothers. By building a grotto in honour of his recently deceased mother (and of course former wife of the emperor), he could at once express his filial piety and curry favour with his distant and imposing father. For the inscription to his grotto, Li Tai employed his father’s memo- rialist and personal calligraphy tutor, intending, in McNair’s words ‘to impress the reader with the imperial air of his inscription and to create an impression of the inevitability of his succession’ (p. 86). And when the heir apparent was stripped of his title after a scan- dalous affair with a singing boy, it looked for a time as if Li Tai’s efforts would succeed. But his efforts to employ Buddhist piety to impress his father and the mistakes of his brother did not in the end compensate for his own failings. He had a reputation for gluttony – he was so fat that the emperor had to grant him special permission to travel within the pal- ace on a small cart since he could barely walk – and he celebrated the fall of the previous heir apparent too publicly. In the end, Li Tai lost the designation of heir apparent to yet another brother, Li Zhi, who went on to become emperor Gaozong, leaving the hapless Li Tai to sink into obscurity before dying prematurely at the age of 35. Although McNair shies away from psychological analysis of the donors, she sees more in the stories behind the images than just politics and the thirst for prestige; she at times uncovers more personal emotions, whether those of a general for his beloved commander (p. 28) or those of a young emperor for his mother, murdered when he was 12, and for his father, who died on campaign when he was 18 (p. 33). I wished at times that McNair would have further explored the role of guilt in the production of Buddhist images. We can safely assume that most of the donors genuinely believed that they would be rewarded for their donations through the mechanism of karma. But if they believed in the positive influence of merit, surely they must have believed in its opposite: punishment for immoral acts. And in the karmic calculations of good and bad deeds, many of the Longmen donors clearly had cause for concern. Empress Dowager Hu, for example, responsible for build- . ‘Filial Piety in Chinese Buddhism’, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 28 (1968), 81–97. Chen’s arti- cle, which suggested that the transfer of merit from a monk or nun to their parents was a sign of sinification, prompted an article by Gregory Schopen that demonstrated that the practice of monastics transferring merit to parents was common in Indian Buddhism as well. Gregory Schopen, ‘Filial Piety and the Monk in the Practice of Indian Buddhism: A Question of “Siniciza- tion” Viewed from the Other Side’, T’oung Pao 70 (1984), 110–26. © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2007 REVIEWS 249 ing a massive pagoda in the capital – perhaps the highest pagoda ever built – a monastery, and a large grotto at Longmen, rose to power as a consort of the emperor when she gave birth to the emperor’s only son (another consort had previously given birth to a son, but he was murdered by the empress). When her five-year-old son was declared emperor, Hu managed to avoid an attempt on her life by the empress, who was then forced to become a nun and later murdered in her convent, presumably with Hu’s knowledge (p. 61). When her son came of age, Hu refused to relinquish power and, when he gave secret orders to a general to liberate him from the clutches of his own mother, the young emperor died mysteriously, after which Hu put yet another child on the throne as puppet emperor. In short, Hu came to power with blood on her hands, and continued to order assassinations – perhaps even of her own son – in order to maintain power. In the ruthlessly violent world of court politics, Buddhist belief provided at once a source of remorse and at the same time avenues for softening its blow. As in the case of prince Li Tai, the story of Empress Dowager Hu is a case study in the vanity of temporal power. Not only did she herself die an ignoble death – drowned by a general whom the son that she saw murdered had called to for assistance before his death – but the projects she sponsored did not leave a lasting legacy: her pagoda and monas- tery were burned, and the grotto she sponsored at Longmen is now known as the ‘Grotto Destroyed by Fire’ (Huoshaoku 火燒窟), reflecting its current state – surely a lesson in the implacable power of impermanence, if not karmic retribution.
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