What do you think?
Rate this book
Donors of Longmen: Faith, Politics, And Patronage in Medieval Chinese Buddhist Sculpture
Donors of Longmen is the first work in a Western language to recreate the history of the Longmen Grottoes, one of China's great stone sculpture treasure houses. Longmen, a UNESCO World Heritage site located near the old capital of Luoyang in modern Henan Province, consists of thousands of ancient cave chapels and shrines containing Buddhist icons of all sizes that were carved into the towering limestone cliffs from the fifth to the eighth century. Beyond its superb sculpture, Longmen also preserves thousands of engraved dedicatory inscriptions by its donors, who included emperors and empresses, aristocrats, court eunuchs, artisans, monks, nuns, lay societies, female palace officials, male civil and military officials, and ordinary lay believers. Based on wide reading of both Asian and Western-language scholarship and careful analysis of the architecture, epigraphy, and iconography of the site, Amy McNair provides a rich and detailed examination of the dynamics of faith, politics, and money at Longmen, beginning with the inception of the site at Guyang Grotto in 493 and concluding with the last major dated project, the forty-eight Amitabhas added to the Great Vairocana Image Shrine in 730. Believers sponsored statues and cave shrines as public acts of giving (dâna) and merit (karma) to generate social credit in the political realm and karmic merit in the spiritual. Although donors' choices of icons reveal the changes in Buddhist religious concerns over the 250-year life of the site, the discussions of expenditure in the dedicatory inscriptions reveal not only how much was spent, but also the rhetoric appropriate to the donor's station in life, gender, and the intended audience. McNair argues that donors made conscious decisions regarding the style of their sculptures--a lively interplay between native Chinese imagery and icons and styles of art from the Buddhist holy land of India--so as to imbue the images with meanings that were immediately comprehensible to their contemporaries. Through the her sensitive and well-informed exploration of Longmen's huge repository of remarkable early sculpture, McNair gives voice to a wide array of medieval believers, many of them traditionally excluded from history. Hers will be the definitive work on Longmen for years to come.
230 pages, Hardcover
First published February 28, 2007
11 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
August 21, 2019
Over the years, I've turned to this book three times (twice several years back and now as I embark in a few days on another visit to Longmen) and although it is NOT a guidebook, I cannot think of a finer text to read before visiting the famous Longmen Grottoes 20 km south of Luoyang, one of China's two central ancient capital cities (the other being Xi'an). It's a guidebook for the intelligent traveller who wants to know more than 'what' they're looking at; it's for those curious souls who also want to know 'why' something was created and what the meaning was behind it.
This was probably not the book's intention--it is what its title claims it to be, a study of the donors of Longmen based upon the inscriptions and statuary found in these important medieval caves in Central China begun in the late 5th century during the N. Wei Dynasty, and finally abandoned in 676, during the Tang. Along the way are the stories of the emperors and their empresses, advisors, consorts and eunuchs who also became sponsors of Longmen, along with the religious societies (known as yiyi) usually composed of commoners. However, had I been the marketing head of the University of Hawai'i Press, I would have encouraged an inversion of the title to: Meaning, Politics and Patronage in Medieval Chinese Buddhist Sculpture as discerned from the site of Longmen. This would have given perspective readers a better hint of the many wonderful bits of useful iconography 'reading' one finds here -- when those delightful little apsaras changed their posture from horizontal to upright (by 502), when flame nimbuses turned into ribbons of flames (about the same time), how to detect the 10 spirit kings by the artefacts they are holding, how the head positions of the lions kneeling on the base of thrones of this period matters in identifying who is sitting on the throne, etc.
The caves are fascinating, not only for their array of a variety of religious statuary from different eras and styles (Central Asian Gandharan, Indian Gupta, Chinese N. Wei, Sui and Tang) but also for the history they tell of the region and the rise and fall of Buddhism in China.
Author McNair combines meticulous research (including personally counting the crumbling figures of group effigies) with the ability to tell a good story and the pages turn easily as one follows the site's history.
My only criticism is that the text could have been a bit less repetitious, but perhaps McNair was only tactfully reminding readers of facts they may had forgotten in the intervening chapters, in which case, well done!
This was probably not the book's intention--it is what its title claims it to be, a study of the donors of Longmen based upon the inscriptions and statuary found in these important medieval caves in Central China begun in the late 5th century during the N. Wei Dynasty, and finally abandoned in 676, during the Tang. Along the way are the stories of the emperors and their empresses, advisors, consorts and eunuchs who also became sponsors of Longmen, along with the religious societies (known as yiyi) usually composed of commoners. However, had I been the marketing head of the University of Hawai'i Press, I would have encouraged an inversion of the title to: Meaning, Politics and Patronage in Medieval Chinese Buddhist Sculpture as discerned from the site of Longmen. This would have given perspective readers a better hint of the many wonderful bits of useful iconography 'reading' one finds here -- when those delightful little apsaras changed their posture from horizontal to upright (by 502), when flame nimbuses turned into ribbons of flames (about the same time), how to detect the 10 spirit kings by the artefacts they are holding, how the head positions of the lions kneeling on the base of thrones of this period matters in identifying who is sitting on the throne, etc.
The caves are fascinating, not only for their array of a variety of religious statuary from different eras and styles (Central Asian Gandharan, Indian Gupta, Chinese N. Wei, Sui and Tang) but also for the history they tell of the region and the rise and fall of Buddhism in China.
Author McNair combines meticulous research (including personally counting the crumbling figures of group effigies) with the ability to tell a good story and the pages turn easily as one follows the site's history.
My only criticism is that the text could have been a bit less repetitious, but perhaps McNair was only tactfully reminding readers of facts they may had forgotten in the intervening chapters, in which case, well done!
Displaying 1 of 1 review