China Daily Global Edition (USA)
Exchanges: Caves reveal a blending of creativity
Stretching along a south-facing cliff, Yungang is among the country’s best-preserved Buddhist grotto temple complexes and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Between the mid-5th and early 6th centuries, workers and artisans constructed dozens of cliffside caves and several hundred smaller niches. They then decorated those spaces with multicolored sculptures, patterns and architectural structures. Consequently, Yungang became an enduring legacy of history, art and culture.
Behind the construction of Yungang Grottoes was the patronage and auspices of the ruling family of the Northern Wei Dynasty (386534). It hoped to showcase imperial superiority and to unite different ethnic clans living in its territory in northern China.
“What makes Yungang a unique case is that, you can see it as a ‘state project’, backed by Northern Wei’s rulers and court elites,” Hang says.
Each of the first five grotto temples houses a colossal Buddha statue, with a height of at least 13 meters, as the central icon for worship. They were built under the suggestion and supervision of Tanyao, a high-ranking monk cleric, and to commemorate Northern Wei’s first five emperors.
“Thereafter this massive project utilized as many resources of the dynasty as possible, in a way to produce a ‘state prototype’, or the ‘Yungang format’,” Hang adds. “And it trained groups of skillful craftsmen who took with them the style of Yungang when moving to other parts of the country.”
He says the influence of Yungang is evident in the representations of Buddhist art across the country, including the Longmen
Grottoes in Luoyang, Henan province, which were built after the Northern Wei court relocated its capital city there from Pingcheng.
He says the model also shaped the styles of caves, statues and decorative motifs of grottoes created during the same period in Dunhuang, Gansu province.
Each of the caves in Yungang sparkles with creativity as a result of encounters, exchanges and infusions of artistic styles from the East and the West. The introduction of Buddhist art from Central and South Asia, which also presented a strong ancient Greek and Roman influence, was merged with Chinese cultural traditions that were already wellestablished before the arrival of Buddhism, and during the process artisans developed new styles and artistic traits to express the outlook on life and death of people at the time.
The variety of sculptures also increased to include Buddha in meditation or teaching doctrines. There are also feitian (the flying deities), jiyue (musicians and dancers), masculine warriors, monastics and Buddhist patrons.
More recent caves exhibited lavish patterns taken from the arts of different cultures, such as the dougong element of the interlocking wooden brackets in traditional Chinese architecture; the “Pompey Pillar” of ancient Rome; the mountain-shaped incense burners invented in China during the 3rd century BC, and the celestial chintamani praying stones for well-wishers from ancient India.
The statues’ physical traits also underwent reforms. Buddhas made in Yungang’s early phase have a broad forehead, high, sharply-cut noses and elongated eyes and eyebrows. The look produces a feeling of solemnity, delivering a message of power, boldness and confidence from Northern Wei, a dynasty founded by nomadic Xianbei people in northern China.
Buddhist statues from the later stages look slim, gentle and elegant. This aesthetic conformed with a gesture prompted by the dynasty’s new emperors, to take on Han conventions and achieve ethnic unity.
Noted architect Liang Sicheng and his team investigated Yungang Grottoes in 1933. In an article about this survey, he concluded that the introduction of Buddhist art brought no fundamental changes to the basic structures of Chinese architecture, but inspired the creation of sculptural styles.
He said: “The spirit, the soul and the taste (of Yungang) are essentially Chinese. Meanwhile, it produced a great deal of novel motifs, patterns and methods of sculpting that spread and have been preserved until today, which is a phenomenon worthy of recognition.”
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