Wisdom Embodied

Wisdom Embodied PDF Author: Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, N.Y.)
Publisher: Metropolitan Museum of Art
ISBN: 1588393992
Category : Buddhist sculpture
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
Chinese Buddhist and Daoist Sculpture in The Metropolitan Museum of Art --

Wisdom Embodied

Wisdom Embodied PDF Author: Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, N.Y.)
Publisher: Metropolitan Museum of Art
ISBN: 1588393992
Category : Buddhist sculpture
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
Chinese Buddhist and Daoist Sculpture in The Metropolitan Museum of Art --

Authentic Replicas

Authentic Replicas PDF Author: Hsueh-man Shen
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 082486705X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
As belief in the Buddha grew and his teachings were transmitted across Asia, Buddhist images, scriptures, and relics were duplicated and reduplicated to satisfy the needs of increasing numbers of the faithful. Yet how were these countless copies of sacred objects able to retain their authenticity and efficacy? Authentic Replicas explores how Buddhists in medieval China (seventh to twelfth centuries) solved this conundrum through the use of traditional methods of replication such as stamping, mold casting, and woodblock printing to create objects that fulfilled the spiritual aspirations of those who possessed them. Setting aside Western notions about the relative value of copies versus the “original,” the book posits Buddhist ideas on what imbues an object with credibility and authority and offers fresh insights into the ways authenticity was represented and reproduced in the Chinese Buddhist context. Each section of the volume focuses on an area of artistic output to provide readers with a thorough grasp of the theological concepts underpinning each act of duplication. Part I looks at the replication of sutras to clarify how the spiritual value of a handwritten sutra differed from a printed one. In Part II, clay tablets, woodblock prints, silk paintings, and cave murals are examined to trace iconographic lineages and uncover the divine identity in each new replica. The chapters in Part III describe in detail the copying of the Buddha’s bodily relics and the endlessly repeated votive act of burying these in stupas. Of particular significance is the visual and textual vocabulary used on reliquaries to persuade adherents to believe in the actual presence of the Buddha concealed inside. Deftly weaving together data and research from several disciplines, including Buddhist studies, archaeology, and art history, Authentic Replicas vividly conveys how replication lay at the heart of Buddhist worship in medieval China, offering a new understanding of how religious belief guided the artistic output of an entire age.

Chinese Sculpture

Chinese Sculpture PDF Author: Angela Falco Howard
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300100655
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 464

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Book Description
Spanning some 7000 years, 'Chinese Sculpture' explores a beautiful and diverse world of objects, many of which have only come to light in the later half of the 20th century. The authors analyse and present, mostly in colour, some 500 examples of Chinese sculpture.

Donors of Longmen

Donors of Longmen PDF Author: Amy McNair
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824829948
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
Donors of Longmen is the first work in a Western language to re-create 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 centuries. 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. Through 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.

Cave Temples of Dunhuang

Cave Temples of Dunhuang PDF Author: Neville Agnew
Publisher: Getty Publications
ISBN: 1606064894
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
The Mogao grottoes in northwestern China, located near the town of Dunhuang on the fabled Silk Road, constitute one of the world’s most significant sites of Buddhist art. Preserved in some five hundred caves carved into rock cliffs at the edge of the Gobi Desert are one thousand years of exquisite wall paintings and sculpture. Founded by Buddhist monks in the late fourth century, Mogao grew into an artistic and spiritual center whose renown extended from the Chinese capital to the far western kingdoms of the Silk Road. Among its treasures are 45,000 square meters of murals, more than 2,000 statues, and over 40,000 medieval silk paintings and illustrated manuscripts. This sumptuous catalogue accompanies an exhibition of the same name, which will run from May 7 through September 4, 2016, at the Getty Center. Organized by the Getty Conservation Institute, Getty Research Institute, Dunhuang Academy, and Dunhuang Foundation, the exhibition celebrates a decades-long collaboration between the GCI and the Dunhuang Academy to conserve this UNESCO World Heritage Site. It presents, for the first time in North America, a collection of objects from the so-called Library Cave, including illustrated sutras, prayer books, and other exquisite treasures, as well as three full-scale, handpainted replica caves. This volume includes essays by leading scholars, an illustrated portfolio on the replica caves, and comprehensive entries on all objects in the exhibition.

Emanated Buddhas in the Aureole of Buddhist Images from India, Central Asia, and China

Emanated Buddhas in the Aureole of Buddhist Images from India, Central Asia, and China PDF Author: Tianshu Zhu
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781604979480
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 524

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Book Description
This study examines the small figures, mostly Buddhas, depicted in the aureole of Buddha images. This motif has appeared in various places in Central Asia and East Asia throughout the centuries. By contextualizing these images in local history and local Buddhism, this book sheds light on issues in Buddhist history and cultural transmission.

Handbook of Oriental Studies

Handbook of Oriental Studies PDF Author: Marylin Martin Rhie
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789004114999
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 952

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Book Description


Shaping the Lotus Sutra

Shaping the Lotus Sutra PDF Author: Eugene Yuejin Wang
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 9780295984629
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 550

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Book Description
The Lotus Sutra has been the most widely read and most revered Buddhist scripture in East Asia since its translation in the third century. The miracles and parables in the "king of sutras" inspired a variety of images in China, in particular the sweeping compositions known as transformation tableaux that developed between the seventh and ninth centuries. Surviving examples in murals painted on cave walls or carved in relief on Buddhist monuments depict celestial journeys, bodily metamorphoses, cycles of rebirth, and the achievement of nirvana. Yet the cosmos revealed in these tableaux is strikingly different from that found in the text of the sutra. Shaping the Lotus Sutra explores this visual world. Challenging long-held assumptions about Buddhist art, Eugene Wang treats it as a window to an animated and spirited world. Rather than focus on individual murals as isolated compositions, Wang views the entire body of pictures adorning a cave shrine or a pagoda as a visual mapping of an imaginary topography that encompasses different temporal and spatial domains. He demonstrates that the text of the Lotus Sutra does not fully explain the pictures and that a picture, or a series of them, constitutes its own "text." In exploring how religious pictures sublimate cultural aspirations, he shows that they can serve both political and religious agendas and that different social forces can co-exist within the same visual program. These pictures inspired meditative journeys through sophisticated formal devices such as mirroring, mapping, and spatial programming - analytical categories newly identified by Wang. The book examines murals in cave shrines at Binglingsi and Dunhuang in northwestern China and relief sculptures in the grottoes of Yungang in Shanxi, on stelae from Sichuan, and on the Dragon-and-Tiger pagoda in Shandong, among other sites. By tracing formal impulses in medieval Chinese picture-making, such as topographic mapping and pictorial illusionism, the author pieces together a wide range of visual evidence and textual sources to reconstruct the medieval Chinese cognitive style and mental world. The book is ultimately a history of the Chinese imagination. Read an interview with the author: http: //dgeneratefilms.com/cinematalk/cinematalk-interview-with-professor-eugene-wang-on-chinese-art-and-film/

The Missing Buddhas

The Missing Buddhas PDF Author: Tony Miller
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789888552924
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description


The Lives of Chinese Objects

The Lives of Chinese Objects PDF Author: Louise Tythacott
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 0857452398
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
This is the biography of a set of rare Buddhist statues from China. Their extraordinary adventures take them from the Buddhist temples of fifteenth-century Putuo – China’s most important pilgrimage island – to their seizure by a British soldier in the First Opium War in the early 1840s, and on to a starring role in the Great Exhibition of 1851. In the 1850s, they moved in and out of dealers’ and antiquarian collections, arriving in 1867 at Liverpool Museum. Here they were re-conceptualized as specimens of the ‘Mongolian race’ and, later, as examples of Oriental art. The statues escaped the bombing of the Museum during the Second World War and lived out their existence for the next sixty years, dismembered, corroding and neglected in the stores, their histories lost and origins unknown. As the curator of Asian collections at Liverpool Museum, the author became fascinated by these bronzes, and selected them for display in the Buddhism section of the World Cultures gallery. In 2005, quite by chance, the discovery of a lithograph of the figures on prominent display in the Great Exhibition enabled the remarkable lives of these statues to be reconstructed.