EPOCHS OF CHINESE 
AND JAPANESE ART 





S T F. FENOLLOSA 



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EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND 
JAPANESE ART 



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EPOCHS of CHINESE 
JAPANESE ART 

AN OUTLINE HIS TORT OF 
EAST ASIATIC DESIGN. 



By 
ERNEST F. FENOLLOSA, 

Formerly Professor of Philosophy in the Imperial University 

of Tokio, Commissioner of Fine Arts to the Japanese 

Government, Etc. 



VOLUME I. 



NEW YORK 

FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY 
PUBLISHERS 



Printed in England. 






FOREWORD. 



By the EDITOR. 



T T TITH the publication of this book three years of continuous work 

yy upon a most complicated and difficult manuscript comes to an 

end. I have had assistance from scholars all over the world. 

Many months have been spent in Japan, where invaluable aid was given 

by artists and scholars who had been associated, several of them since the 

year 1880, with the archaeological researches and the study of Chinese 

and "Japanese Art to which, shortly after his arrival in "Japan, Ernest 

Fenollosa determined to devote his life. The original manuscript of this 

book, left as it was in hasty pencil writing, was little more than a rough 

draft of the finished work he intended to make of it. Many historical 

dates, the names of temples, Sanskrit and Chinese names, and even the 

full names of artists were often left a blank. Especially in the choice of 

\ illustrations has the work seemed, at times, beyond the grasp of any 

intelligence less than his. A full list of these was made out, but often 

the description consisted of a single word of identification known only to the 

< writer. From the beginning I knew that there were certain omissions* 

-, which could never be Ji lied, and certain mistakes which inevitably I must 



* E.G. In the first volume, on page 159, a copy by Sumiyoshi of a painting by 
Kanawoka should figure ; in Vohime II., on page 87, a passage is supposed to be shown of 
one of Satan's great landscape screens ; and on page 96 there is a reference to the repro- 
duction of a panel of Motonobu which could not be found. Again, on page 1 36 the reader 
will miss the head of one of the figures from a screen of the Korin School; on page 156 
the Professor refers to his photograph of a Shang bronze which we cannot produce ; the 
same must be said of a photograph mentioned on the next page of certain porcelains in a 
Pekin collection ; and on page 199 a landscape by Toyokuni is mentioned as being given, but 
no photograph could be sufficiently identified to be here reproduced. (PUBLISHER'S NOTE.) 



274734 



vi FOREWORD. 

make. Yet it was the writer's personal charge to me to bring out his 
book in the best way I could, and this represents my best. All deficiencies 
and errors must be charged to me alone. Even as the work now stands 
it could never have been accomplished but for the encouragement and 
assistance of Mr. Charles L. Freer, of Detroit, Professor Ariga Nagao 
and the artist Kano Tomonobu, of Japan, Mr. Laurence Binyon, of 
London, Professor Arthur W. Donv, of Columbia University, New York, 
and others too numerous to be mentioned, but to whom I owe deep grati- 
tude. A special word of thanks too must be given to those kind friends 
as well as publishers, Mr. Heinemann, of London, and Mr. Frederick 
A. Stokes, of New York City, also to The Secretary of State for India 
in Council for permission to reproduce four of the illustrations that 
appeared in ''Ancient Khotan" 

MARY FENOLLOSA. 



PREFACE 

IN the earlier years of our marriage, during our residence in Tokio, 
ERNEST FENOLLOSA would, from time to time, fall into a mood not 
unfamiliar to any of us as we grow older, that of finding a certain 
delicate pleasure in speaking of his early childhood. His parentage 
was unusual ; his whole intellectual and temperamental child-life, so to 
speak, just a little above the normal. His first memory (and he must 
have been little more than an infant at the time) was of lying in the 
sun on a floor near a window, and hearing his parents, his mother at 
the piano, his father with a violin, playing what he afterwards learned 
to recognize as Beethoven's Sonata Appassionata. His father was a 
professional musician in Salem, and all the early years of his son's life 
seem to have been involved and interwoven with strains and themes 
from the great composers. 

Once, in Tokio, during such a mood of reminiscence, 1 suggested 
that he let me get a note-book and pencil and take the impressions 
down in order. He agreed, and in a few moments more I was ready, 
and had inscribed a new note-book with the words, " Notes on Ernest's 
Childhood." The following pages are those written at his dictation. 

" My father's full baptismal name was Manuel Francisco Ciriaco 
Fenollosa del Pino del Gil del Alvarez, the names Francisco and 
Ciriaco standing for the two patron saints, according to Spanish custom. 
Pino was the family name of his mother and Gil and Alvarez of his 
two grandmothers. The Alvarez he supposed to be a modified form 
of the family name Alvarado, so famous in Spanish History, not 
impossibly the direct descendants of Alvarado, the Lieutenant of Cortez 
in Mexico, who married the daughter of the King of the Tlascalans. 
His descendants by her are said to have founded families in Spain. 
The name Fenollosa is also an historic one, and is doubtless the same 
as that of the Penalosa, another companion of Cortez, who made the 
first exploring expedition up through Texas, New Mexico and Colorado. 
The ' F ' and ' 11 ' of the name as pronounced in Spanish can be 
given many kinds of English spelling. Thus, hardened, the ' F ' 
VOL. i. B 



viii PREFACE 

would become a ' P ' ; softened, it would become an ' H.' The 
liquid sound of the ' 11 ' may easily be transformed into the sound 
of the English ' Y,' or even ' J.' Thus actually rose a great many 
ways of spelling the name, and I recall seeing in my youth an old 
Spanish illumination belonging to my father's sister, Mrs. Emilio, in 
which the name was written c Hinajosa.' The Fenollosa family was 
from ancient days settled in the old Roman city of Valencia. I knew 
from my father this one fact only, and that his father, also Manuel 
Fenollosa, was born there. But from a Spanish sculptor in New York, 
Fernando Miranda, I learned that several branches of the family were 
still living in Valencia, that there is a street named after the family, 
and that one Fenollosa is a priest in the cathedral of Santes Juanes. 
At my request Mr. Miranda wrote to this priest and got a most 
courteous reply, saying that he would gladly look up anything for me 
in Valencia if I would tell him what was desired. Unfortunately 
I have never yet taken advantage of this opportunity. 

" I remember also hearing my father say that he had two cousins, 
unmarried ladies, living in Madrid, but that was about 1870. My 
grandfather, Manuel Fenollosa, must have been born somewhere about 
1785 or 1790, and left Valencia as a young man to join in the wars 
which troubled Spain in the early part of the nineteenth century, 
presumably the wars with Napoleon. He was a musician by profession, 
but I did not know whether he entered the army as a member of a 
military band, or as an ordinary soldier. After leaving the army he 
settled down as a musician in Malaga, where he married Ysobel del 
Pino of the neighbouring town, Canillas de Aceytuno. My father was 
born on one of the last few days of December in 1818 or 1819. 

"He used to tell me many stories of his life as a boy. There was 
a great rocky height on which the Moors, driven from Granada, had 
their last fortress and palace in Spain. About its ruins he used to 
love to clamber, and once fell down a steep part of the slope, cutting 
his forehead deeply. The scar of this was large, and was visible to 
the day of his death. He was a musical prodigy, and remembered 
that, at the age ot five or six years, he was made to stand on a table 
in the midst of a crowded hall and sing, in a child's soprano voice, 
leading arias from Italian operas. By this time also he was quite 
proficient on the piano and on the violin, and by the age of ten was 
playing in public. He took great delight in being leader of the boys' 



PREFACE ix 

choir in the cathedral of Malaga, and used to laugh with joy as he 
told of the pranks that he and a comrade used to play in that ancient 
edifice, climbing up under the tower, exploring long-forgotten lofts, 
and once lying in hiding so that they might break the rules against 
staying in the church all night. He had love affairs, too, in his boyish 
days, and used to speak of a little black-eyed aristocrat for singing 
serenades under whose balcony he was punished by his father. He had 
no brothers, and but one sister, Ysobel, who was born in 1820, and 
of whom he was very fond. When he was about fourteen, some war, 
one of the Carlists', I believe, broke out in Spain, and there was fear 
that all the young men might be drafted into the army. The war was 
very unpopular in Malaga, certainly among my father's friends and 
associates, for the songs of this period that he sometimes would sing 
me were all about constitutions, liberty and denunciation of tyranny. 
A man some years older than he, Don Manuel Emilio, also a musician, 
was engaged to marry his sister Ysobel, and at this time was leader 
of a celebrated military band. At this moment there happened to be 
a frigate of the U.S. Navy in the port of Malaga, and its commander 
made a proposition to take this band to America as the naval band of 
the ship. The fear of having him drafted into the army prompted 
Manuel's parents and Mr. Emilio to try to get him a chance to escape 
to America with this band. It was found that there was but one 
vacancy, that of the French horn, an instrument which he had never 
touched. The ship was to sail next morning, and Mr. Emilio said, 
' Manuel, if you will spend the whole night practising the French horn 
it may be possible for you to pass the examination in the morning. 
At any rate, I will announce you now, publicly, as a candidate.' The 
night was so passed, the examination successful, and he went off on 
the ship that day. Before reaching America the frigate was to touch at 
the Balearic Isles, whither she was conveying an old gentleman, the new 
Spanish Governor of the Isles. This old Don, as it chanced, became 
interested in and really attached to the boy Manuel. When they arrived 
at Majorca there was already great excitement about the war ; the rules 
were imperative that no one should leave Spain without a passport^. 
It had been too late to procure one at Malaga, and the authorities 
were about to refuse to let young Fenollosa proceed. At this crisis 
the Governor was appealed to, and through his influence he was allowed 
to continue his voyage. 

B 2 



x PREFACE 

" The Spanish band was soon discharged from the frigate, but for 
several years held together as an American organization. Railroads were 
almost non-existent in those days and the great cities along the Atlantic 
coast much more isolated. But there was already a growing love for 
music, and this band every winter had immense success, giving series 
of concerts and travelling overland in coaches and by boat from 
Washington to Portland, Maine. Mr. Emilio was always the leader. 
He was a great performer on the violin. In a musical criticism or, 
rather, reminiscence in a New York paper as late as 1892, I read a 
notice of these concerts, in which the writer spoke of the modern 
virtuosi who have come from Europe to America during the last fifty 
years, but that to one who had heard Emilio play in the Spanish band 
in the eighteen thirties all later performances seemed to lack heart and 
genius. I have heard my father often refer to these journeys and tell 
how, as a boy still in his teens, he played sometimes the violin, some- 
times a wind-instrument often in solos. He was always placed at 
the very front of the stage, and was the pet of the band. In all cities 
where they visited the musicians were royally entertained. The sort 
of music they played was the best Italian, generally from operas, but 
they also introduced something of the new German school, Mozart, 
Beethoven, Meyerbeer, etc., etc. 

" At last the band broke up, and its members settled down as pro- 
fessional musicians in one or another city. Salem, Massachusetts, had 
been one of the leading centres of refinement and of love for music. 
The commerce of its merchants extended to all parts of the earth, and 
its aristocratic families were the rivals of Boston in wealth, education 
and the advantages of foreign travel. Among such wealthy patrons of 
culture there was one especially, Mr. George Peabody, who was a fine 
amateur painter as well as musician. He had a collection of old 
European masterpieces both of paintings and of musical instruments, 
such as violins, lutes, etc. He was himself an excellent performer on 
the 'cello. He had often entertained the Spanish band at his house, 
perhaps the finest of the old colonial mansions in Salem. When the 
band broke up it was to his urgent solicitations especially that Mr. Emilio 
and my father yielded in deciding to make Salem their future home. 
In those days the two Spaniards spent most of their evenings and many 
afternoons playing with Mr. Peabody in his studio. The latter outlived 
them both, not dying until 1890, or thereabouts, at a very advanced age. 



PREFACE xi 

"Before long my father's sister, Ysobel, came over from Spain to 
be married to Mr. Emilio, and my father took up his residence with 
them. My father is said to have been a great social favourite, and as 
music teacher visited at most of the leading houses. He also played 
in orchestras at Boston. In the early days of the railroad between 
Salem and Boston there were few evening trains, and he used to relate 
to me with pride how many and many a time he had walked back from 
Boston to Salem, sixteen miles through the snow, his violin slung across 
his back, reaching home in time for breakfast. He must, in these 
days, have possessed a very strong constitution, but an accident, that 
of losing his foothold upon one of the bridges and falling through 
into icy water, checked for ever all such adventures, and brought on a 
temporary haemorrhage of the lungs. 

" The family kept up constant communication with the old people 
in Malaga, and somewhere about 1845 tnev induced the old Manuel 
and Ysobel Fenollosa to come over and live with them in Salem. The 
old man was not at all contented. He could not appreciate the advance 
of science, free thought and republican institutions, for all of which 
Salem was a leading centre, and the young Spaniards leading advocates. 
In less than a year old Manuel returned to Spain alone, where he died 
not long after. My grandmother remained with her children for nearly 
three years, but she, too, was discontented, especially with the changes 
in religious matters. The children had, of course, in Spain been 
baptized Roman Catholics, but had already become Episcopalian 
Protestants. The mother resented this apostasy, and for herself, 
though most assiduous in her devotions at the cathedral in Salem, could 
not feel at home with alien priests, and a congregation composed, for 
the most part, of immigrant Irish. So before 1850 she too had returned 
to Malaga, and there lived in religious retirement until her death. 
Communication with her in Malaga was of course kept up, but at 
longer and longer intervals. I remember as a child having casks of 
wine and boxes of raisins sent to our home directly from Malaga. 

" Among my father's pupils in Salem were many aristocratic young 
ladies, among whom my mother was one of his favourite pupils on the 
piano. I must now go back and say something of her family. My 
mother's name was Mary Silsbee, and she was the daughter of William 
Silsbee and Mary Hodges, both descendants of old Salem families whose 
ancestors had migrated from England in the early days of the Salem 



xii PREFACE 

colony. The Hodges family had always been known in Salem, but the 
Silsbee family was somewhat obscure before the rise to wealth of the three 
brothers, of whom my grandfather was one. These brothers, Nathaniel, 
Zachary and William, were, in the years succeeding the Revolution, 
among that considerable number of Salem ship-owners and ship-captains 
who made the commerce of the Atlantic colonies and the coasts of India, 
Java, the Straits and the Philippines. I think they operated in partner- 
ship. They sent out cargoes in their strong, New England-built barks, 
and these, after a two years' voyage, would return bringing the treasures 
of the East up to the Derby Street wharves. The brothers were all 
highly educated men, graduates of Harvard. Of them, Zachary was the 
most devoted to commerce, but Nathaniel became United States senator 
from Massachusetts during Washington's and other early Administrations. 
William, who was my grandfather, was the most scholarly and 
philosophical. It is said that many unpublished letters of him to his 
brother, the senator, still exist, and that these show a profound and 
original grasp of the political problems then agitating the young states. 
He was a tall, thin, dark-eyed man of aristocratic presence. 

" My grandmother, Mary Hodges, was a very beautiful woman, with 
light hair and blue eyes, and an expression of great benevolence and 
sweetness. It was remarked as strange that such a handsome couple 
should have a lot of comparatively homely children. These children, 
of whom my mother was one, numbered seven. All but one lived to 
a somewhat advanced age. My mother was born at Salem in the 
year, I think, of 1816. Although still a child when she died, I can 
remember hearing some of her impressions of her early youth from 
her own lips. She lived in the big colonial house still standing on 
the lower part of Essex Street. It is but a stone's throw from 
Hawthorne's house on Union Street, and hardly more than that from 
Hawthorne's Custom House. The long slope of hill on the water- 
side, now completely built up, was in her childhood one great, 
beautiful, old-fashioned garden, full of hedges, arbors, fruit trees, box- 
bordered paths, and wide flower beds. It reached quite down to 
Derby Street, on the opposite side of which were the wharves ; and 
my mother remembered hearing the gun fired which announced the 
return, after long voyaging, of one of her father's ships ; and watching 
from the house windows the unlading of the wharves below and 
the long lines of men bringing up precious burdens of tea, silks, 



PREFACE xiii 

porcelains, lacquer and Polynesian curiosities, through the garden paths. 
From the front windows of their home the children could look down 
upon Essex Street, then the chief thoroughfare, and listen to their 
mother tell how she, in her childhood, had watched through half- 
closed blinds the British red-coats as they marched up the street. 

" The three brothers had all married, and each had a group of 
children living within a stone's throw of one another. Of these, the 
boys, as they came of age, went to Harvard, as their fathers had done 
before them. The girls were educated at a fashionable private school 
in Salem amid a crowd of brilliant and beautiful belles who, at that 
time, attracted the attention of all the Boston youth. In fact, it was 
said to be the choicest delight of the Bostonian to be invited down at 
the height of the Salem season to spend several days as guest at one 
of her many high-ceiled mansions. On Saturday nights the boys 
brought down their friends from Cambridge, and there were few parties 
in Boston as gay as the Salem assemblies. At this period the wealth 
and shipping of Salem exceeded those of Boston." 

At this point the dictation stops and, because of a multitude of newer 
interests, was never resumed. 

His childhood was spent among these young cousins, and should 
have been a happy one ; but apparently this was not the case. He 
was, by nature, a shrinking and sensitive child, easily rebuffed, and 
imagining slights where none were intended. The death of his mother 
when he was about eleven years of age threw over him a still deeper cast 
of melancholy. He attended the Hacker Grammar School in Salem, 
and was fitted at the High School of that city for Harvard, entering 
the school in the year 1866, with the rank of number one in the 
preliminary examinations. At college he soon became known as a 
student of unusual qualities, but socially he still remained sensitive 
and reserved, and did not make friends easily. He was a member of 
the College Glee Club, and sang in the chorus of the Handel and 
Hayden Society. Intellectually his deepest interest was soon fixed 
upon philosophy, and the influence of Hegel especially remained with 
him a vital and constructive factor throughout his life. Just at the 
beginning he was greatly influenced by the writings of Herbert 
Spencer, and was active in forming the Herbert Spencer Club, 
to which Mr. Louis Dyer, Mr. Samuel Clarke and a few other 
devotees belonged. 



xiv PREFACE 

From time to time he had contributed verses, some of them 
farcical, to the College periodicals, but the real quality of his poetic gift 
was not suspected until his reading of the "class poem" in 1874. In 
this, his graduate year, also he took the first prize in the University 
Boylston Competition for Elocution. He graduated first in a class ot 
one hundred and fifty men, with a senior year average of ninety-nine 
per cent., and received " Higher Honours " in philosophy. He had 
won the " Parker Fellowship," but instead of going abroad decided to 
take the residence course for a degree in philosophy. The problems 
of religion and philosophy were, at this time of life, of primary im- 
portance. He entered the Divinity School at Cambridge, but did not 
remain long, being attracted to the new " Art Movement " awakening 
under the auspices of the Art School at the Boston Museum. Here, 
under Professor Grundmann, he began a course in drawing and painting. 

In 1878, through the influence of Professor Morse, of Salem, he 
was called to the University of Tokio, then just opening its doors 
to foreign instruction. He was appointed Professor of Political 
Economy and Philosophy. Thus he entered a veritable wonderland of 
new thought, new influences and new inspiration. From the first 
moment he felt himself at one with the Japanese spirit. Many of his 
students were men older than he. In his great earnestness, when 
striving to demonstrate some difficult point of logic, he would step 
down from the platform, and go among his " boys," as he affection- 
ately called them, putting an arm about their shoulders, and by the 
power of sheer magnetism and intellect enforce his meaning. I, who 
never knew him in those early days, have loved to talk with those 
who did. Among his first graduate class rank many of the leading 
statesmen of modern Japan, and because of this fact, a beautiful title 
is often attached to his name. He is spoken of, even now, as "Daijin 
Sense!,' or "The Teacher of Great Men." From 1878 until 1886 
he was, every recurrent two years, re-appointed to his Chair in the 
University " Professor of Logic," and, later on, " Professor of 
./Esthetics," were added to his official titles. From the first year he 
had become deeply interested in an art new to him, the art of Old 
Japan, and, it must be added, of Old China, too, for in Japan the 
one cannot be studied without the other. 

Just at this moment the Japanese themselves were turning from 
all their old traditions and indulging in an orgy of foreignism. Italian 



PREFACE xv 

sculptors and painters were imported. Foreign teachers, missionaries and 
adventurers flocked in from all parts of the world. European costumes 
and customs began to be adopted. In the break up of the feudal system 
many of the proudest old Lords or " Daimyo " had been reduced to poverty. 
Their retainers suffered a similar fate. Collections of paintings, porcelains, 
lacquers, bronzes and prints were scattered, and treasures that are now 
almost priceless could at that time he bought for a few yen. It is even 
said that among the extreme foreignists some of these collections were 
burned as rubbish. The abolition of Buddhism as a national religion, so to 
speak, came with the downfall of feudalism, and, as a consequence, the 
treasures of the temples fared only a little less badly than those of private 
homes and castles. 

It is a strange thing that at such a crisis it should have been the keen 
eye and prophetic mind of a young American who first realized the 
threatened tragedy, and that to his energy and effort, more than to any 
other cause, was due a swift reaction. This statement which, at first read- 
ing, may sound a little boastful and exaggerated, will be verified by every 
Japanese who is familiar with the history of those turbulent days ; and is 
further borne out by the diplomas given, at successive intervals, by the 
Japanese Emperor when bestowing some new order or decoration upon the 
zealous worker for the preservation of Japanese Art. 

At first it was only during the summer months of vacation that he 
really studied the art, or could find time to travel to the more remote pro- 
vinces, and visit temples where certain treasures of sculpture or painting 
were said to exist. The government became more and more generous in 
giving him authority during such expeditions, finally incurring all expenses, 
and furnishing him with able secretaries and interpreters. It was during 
these temple sojourns that his interest in Buddhism, both as a religion and 
a constructive philosophy, was aroused. Mediaeval art in Japan and China 
is as much involved with Buddhism as is Mediaeval European Art with 
Christianity. 

In 1 88 1 he established a little artists' club called " Kangwakai," renting 
a hall for a meeting place and afterwards for exhibitions, taking upon him- 
self all incidental expenses, and presiding at all gatherings. In this effort 
his chief inspirer and fellow-worker was the artist Kano Hogai, already 
well into middle age, a splendid and rebellious spirit, and the last of the 
really great artists of old Japan. This man, proud of his name and 
traditions, for he was a direct descendant of the long line of Kano painters, 



xvi PREFACE 

had been one of the very few to hold scornfully aloof from the invasion of 
foreign ideas. But in spite of this, the genius, earnestness and purpose of 
the young American finally won him over, and they became not only 
colleagues, but the closest of personal friends, each believing in and supple- 
menting the other, and each working with heart and soul to save Japanese 
Art to Japan. 

Already, by the next year, 1882, there had begun a sort of reaction 
among the nobles, and Ernest Fenollosa was asked to assist in organizing 
the " Bijitsu-kwai " or " Art Club of Nobles." At the first meeting, largely 
attended, for by this time his name was spoken everywhere, he opened 
proceedings with a fearless and inflammatory speech denouncing a rate who 
would see their greatest birthright slipping through their fingers and make 
no effort to retain it. He deplored the then prevailing system of teaching 
American-style pencil drawing in the public schools, and of studying oil- 
painting and modern marble sculpture under Italian instructors. From out 
of the great gasp that followed the end of this speech so more than one 
Japanese has told me came the rebirth of national pride and interest in 
Japanese Art. No wonder they call him the " Boddhisattva of Art." 

In this same year a minor study, of which something must be said later 
on, was taken up. This was of the sacred drama called " No," sometimes 
spelled in France and England " Noh." He found in it most interesting 
analogies with early morality plays of Europe, and especially with earliest 
forms of Greek drama. His teacher was Umewaka Minoru, who, before 
the great break-up of 1868, was court actor to the Shogun. 

By the year 1883 the Artist's Club, Kangwa-kwai, was on a self-sup- 
porting basis, and dear old Kano Hogai getting more commissions than he 
could fulfil. Of him, writing elsewhere, Ernest Fenollosa has said, " Kano 
Hogai, the great central genius of Meiji, may be regarded as clearly 
striking a last note on the great instrument which Godoshi first sounded." 
The name next in importance to that of Hogai, was that of Hashimoto 
Gaho, also one of the original founders of the Kangwa-kwai, and a fine artist. 
He died but a few years ago. The Japanese prize his work very highly. 

In 1885, a special Art Commission, after five months' sitting, reported 
favourably upon Professor Fenollosa's recommendation that purely 
Japanese art, with the use of Japanese ink, brush and paper, should be 
re-introduced into all schools. A preliminary office of a new central Art 
School, with leading artists from the Kangwa-kwai as instructors, under the 
supervision of Professor Fenollosa, was instituted, and plans for a 



PREFACE xvii 

national Art Museum begun. In the next year the Kangwa-kwai held 
a public exhibition of all its best work done since 1881. To the Tokio 
public, and to the Government, this proved a revelation of creative power. 

In June, 1886, he was, for the fifth time, reappointed to the Chair 
of Philosophy in the University, but in the very next month, July, 
was transferred from the University to a Commissionership of Fine Arts, 
to be held under the joint authority of the Educational Department 
(for schools) and the Imperial Household Department (for museums). 
This included the offices and titles " Manager of the Fine Arts 
Academy," " Manager of the Art Department of the Imperial 
Museum," and " Professor of Aesthetics and the History of Art in the 
Fine Arts Academy." Later in the year he was sent abroad, with two 
Japanese colleagues, as a special Commissioner to report on European 
methods of Art Administration and Education. This Commission 
visited all the great centres in Europe, and purchased, for use in 
Japan, large quantities of photographs and books. 

In the next year, 1887, the Commission returned, and the Normal 
Art School of Tokio was formally opened. Professor Fenollosa was now 
given, as assistants, nine Japanese experts in archeology and art ; and 
was entrusted with the task of registering all the art treasures of the 
country, particularly those of temples. This work included the drawing 
up of laws concerning repairs, subsidies, export, etc., etc. These years, 
from 1886 to 1889, may justly be considered as marking the height 
and climax of his personal influence in Japan. He had been already 
thrice decorated by the Emperor, held a definite rank at Court, and was 
the recipient of countless social and official honours. But by this time, 
some of the Japanese with whom he had been working, and whom 
he had inspired, began to take a more individual interest in this great 
national movement, for such it had become. During his absence in 
Europe, these active .spirits had, of necessity, greater control, and 
Professor Fenollosa found, upon his return, that no longer would his 
be the single mind to direct affairs of art. It was characteristic of him 
that no bitterness or resentment came with this realization. Other 
foreigners placed, on a very much smaller scale, in similar positions, 
have written whole books to denounce the Japanese as a nation of 
ingrates, of treacherous underminers, that sapped knowledge and experience 
from their foreign teachers, and then threw the husk aside. But Professor 
Fenollosa had no such conception of the situation. Rather he rejoiced 



xviii PREFACE 

in the courage and intelligence of the Japanese spirit that could so quickly 
adapt and assimilate new thoughts, and begin weaving them into the 
very fibres of a new national growth. Honours were still piled thickly 
enough upon him. He held his various offices and titles undisturbed, 
but he felt, intuitively, that the time had come when the Japanese had 
better manage their own art affairs. 

A few years before, in 1886, he had sold his collection of Japanese 
paintings to Dr. G. C. Weld of Boston, under the conditions that it 
was to remain permanently in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and 
have the name Fenollosa attached to it. In 1890 he received a pro- 
position from this Museum to become Curator of the newly-established 
Department of Oriental Art ; and decided at once to accept. On the 
eve of his departure from Japan the Emperor granted a personal 
audience, bestowing with his own hand a fourth decoration. This was 
called " The Order of the Sacred Mirror," and, up to the time of its 
presentment, I have been told, no such exalted order had been given to 
a foreigner. Its special significance is that the recipient has given 
personal service to the Emperor. 

It must have been a wonderful sight, the Court in full regalia, 
grave Japanese nobles and statesmen standing silently about, all eyes 
directed to the one foreigner in the great hall, an American, still 
young, kneeling to receive the highest personal order yet bestowed, and 
to hear words spoken by the Emperor's own lips, " You have taught 
my people to know their own art ; in going back to your great country, 
I charge you, teach them also." 

For five years he remained in Boston, re-arranging the treasures so 
many of which had once been his ; cataloguing by number the whole 
collection, and writing special catalogues for the various exhibitions. 
Some of these were loan exhibits, brought over directly from Japan, 
others were made from portions of the great collection now housed 
within the Museum walls. But this alone was not enough to fill the 
brilliant and ever-reaching mind of such a man. He began to take 
deep interest in " Problems of Art Education in America." His recent 
experiences in Japan, supplemented by European research, could not fail 
to give him a new and vital point of view. One fundamental thought 
which has since been widely quoted, is as follows : The tentative effort 
of art-expression in childhood and in primitive races has been, in all 
ages and in all lands, practically the same, and its keynote is "spacing." 



PREFACE xix 

The hard pencil drawing, copying of shaded cubes, pyramids and balls, 
still in use in most public schools, were, in his opinion, fatal to real 
development. Scarcely less pernicious was the enforced drawing from 
plaster casts " tracing the shadow of a shadow," he called it. Life, 
motion, colour, impression, composition, spacing above all, spacing, 
these formed, in his creed, the only true lines of growth. 

In this book of his, " Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art," re- 
presenting his latest and most mature thought, it will be seen that he 
continues to place the quality of spacing, as the key not only of design, 
but of all the visual arts. It must be kept in mind that at the time 
of his bold arraignment against drawing from the cast, the thought 
was a new and revolutionary one. He was attacked on all sides. 

While in the first enthusiastic stages of his work for a better system 
of Art Education in America, a new and very precious friendship was 
formed. This was with Mr. Arthur Wesley Dow, of Ipswich, 
Massachusetts, a young artist who had just returned from Paris. 
Literally from the first moment in which he met Professor Fenollosa 
and was shown some of the great examples of Japanese Art, these two 
influences became clear factors in his life. On the other hand Professor 
Fenollosa found in this ardent and receptive young spirit the inspiration 
and encouragement for which he had been longing. The two friends 
worked together, sometimes in the same school, as at Pratt Institute at 
Brooklyn, sometimes at great distances, but always in perfect sympathy, 
in the years that were to follow. And if the name, the methods and 
the vital truths imparted to American Art by Professor Fenollosa are 
to persist in the consciousness of the American people, it will be due 
chiefly to the untiring efforts and splendid loyalty of Professor Dow. 

Another phase of intellectual activity found outlet on the lecture 
platform. In 1892 he gave his first series of public lectures. These 
were given in Boston, with the title " Chinese and Japanese History, 
Literature and Arts." He was asked to speak before many clubs and 
private gatherings, on the same topics ; and at Cambridge delivered 
the Phi Beta Kappa poem "East and West." In 1893, at the time 
of the great Columbian Fair at Chicago, he was appointed member of 
the Fine Arts Jury, especially to represent Japan, since Japan here, 
for the first time, exhibited her Art classified among the " Fine Arts," 
and not among " Industries." From this time onward he began to 
lecture in all the larger cities of this country, and the demand for his 



xx PREFACE 

courses grew at such a rate that it was found necessary to employ an 
assistant curator in the Oriental Department of the Boston Museum. 
This post was offered to and accepted by Mr. Dow. But in the follow- 
ing year, 1895, Mr. Dow's services were acquired by Mr. Frederick 
W. Pratt, of the Pratt Institute, as instructor in Art, and with the 
privilege of establishing a new system based upon the universal 
principles set forth by Professor Fenollosa during the year 1884 and 
put into practice by the Japanese Art Academy. His partial services 
as lecturer and art critic were also secured by Mr. Pratt, and thus was 
taken the first definite, revolutionary step toward establishing, in 
America, the new art education. 

By this time the work of arranging and cataloguing the Oriental 
treasures of the Boston Art Museum was practically complete. Professor 
Fenollosa saw no future there except as a sort of showman and personal 
demonstrator, and as writer of sporadic catalogues. More serious 
writing and lecturing appeared now to be the best means of carrying 
forward his teaching and his thoughts. Above all, he felt the need 
of travel, to get into touch once more with the art centres of Europe, 
and to visit, after several years' absence, the ever-changing Japan. He 
sailed for Europe in the spring of 1896, spent several months there 
in study, and continued around by the Eastern route to Japan. Late 
summer there and early autumn were spent in a Japanese villa beside 
the river Kamo which flows through the sacred capital of Kyoto. Life 
was carried on in purely a Japanese way. There were no other 
foreigners except Mrs. Fenollosa (myself), and the menage consisted 
of two Japanese servants, a student-interpreter, and one of the Professors 
of Chinese Poetry from the University of Tokio. Japanese artists, 
priests and poets began to frequent the place. There were many 
visits, on our part, to the homes of these, and also to temples, chiefly 
to the patriarch Chiman Ajari, a great teacher, now passed into the 
Beyond, and, over the shoulder of one of the great Kyoto boundary 
hills to Miidera, on the shores of Omi (called by foreigners Lake Biwa). 
It was at this temple, the great stronghold of the leading esoteric sect, 
that Professor Fenollosa first seriously studied Buddhism. The Arch- 
bishop was then Sakurai Ajari, who had since died. Under his 
successor, Keiyen Ajari, we both now studied. 

All the depth, the wonder and the romance of Japanese thought 
seemed to return to Ernest Fenollosa in an overwhelming wave. 



P R E F A C E xxi 

There was no other course for him than to go back to America, 
settle his affairs as best he could, and return for an indefinite stay 
in Japan. This was done, and in the years following, from 1897 
to 1900, he lived in Tokio, though travelling often to Kyoto, Nara, 
Nikko and places less well known. Always he was studying, 
acquiring, reaching forward. Now it was not alone art that he 
pursued, but religion, sociology, the No drama, and Chinese and 
Japanese poetry. He delivered many lectures in the various Tokio 
schools, and before art clubs and institutions, wrote articles for 
Japanese, English and American publications, and began a clear 
mapping out of this work, "Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art." 

But in 1900 the demand for American lectures had become so 
insistent that he decided to return for at least a season. He began on 
the Pacific coast, lecturing before Universities, Art Clubs and Women's 
Clubs in San Francisco and other large cities, travelled slowly eastward, 
stopping at the larger cities on the way, and finally reached New 
York, which he decided to make his headquarters. Mr. Dow's 
appointment in 1904 as Professor of Art in Teacher's College, 
Columbia, he had welcomed as a great triumph. 

During this year, too, he was deeply stirred by the splendid 
struggle of Japan in her war with Russia. Ten years before, at the 
close of the Japan-China war, when the just rewards of victory were 
withheld by the so-called Triple Alliance, he had said publicly, and 
had written, in printed articles, these words, "Japan will yet hold 
Port Arthur, but she will reach it through seas of blood." 

The years 1905-6-7-8 brought him ever wider and more apprecia- 
tive audiences. There is no need to dwell upon the many courses 
of lectures given, or to enumerate the various universities, art 
museums, clubs, private schools and drawing-rooms in which they 
were delivered. It is enough to state that these were years of in- 
creasing triumphs. Professor Dow at Columbia was carrying forward 
the work of Art Education with splendid effect. Already the classes 
which had graduated at Pratt Institute under the Fenollosa-Dow 
system, as it is often called, were applying its principles in smaller 
towns all over the union. There could be no doubt, now, of success. 
But the most vital and important happening of these years occurred 
in the summer of 1906, when Professor Fenollosa, deliberately can- 
celling a series of Chatauquan lecture engagements, remained in his 



xxii PREFACE 

New York apartments, and in one magnificent effort, completed, in 
three months, a rough pencil draft of this book, " Epochs of Chinese 
and Japanese Art." 

After the month of October, 1906, it was never touched. 
November brought new lecture courses, and during the summer of 

1907, a long Western lecture tour was made. At times, when I 
urged him to take up the work on the manuscript, he would say, 
" I cannot finish it until another visit to Japan. I must see Mr. 
Ariga, and old Kano Tomonobu, and some of the others who have 
worked with me for Japanese art. There are corrections to be made, 
dates to be filled in, certain historical facts to be verified, and all 
these can be done in Japan only." 

He died, quite suddenly, in London, just on the eve of sailing 
for home after a summer spent in study abroad, on September 2ist, 

1908. In the spring of 1910, after having completed the long and 
difficult task of putting into type-written form the scattered, pencilled 
pages, I took the original and the typed manuscripts to Japan. For 
two months Mr. Ariga and old Kano Tomonobu worked with me 
upon it. There were others also who gave assistance, but to these 
two is chiefly due the fact that practically all omissions were filled, 
all dates verified. Mr. Ariga (Dr. Ariga Nagao, to give his full 
name) is a noted scholar in Chinese and Japanese history, and in 
Chinese poetry, as well as a great statesman and diplomat. Without 
his personal interest and co-operation this book could never have been 
brought to light. 

His, too, was a moving spirit in the unique and beautiful tribute 
paid to Professor Fenollosa by the Japanese Government in the 
removal of his ashes from Highgate, London, to a permanent home in 
the temple grounds of Miidera, overlooking Omi. This was Professor 
Fenollosa's own desire, and a more fitting resting-place was never 
given. 

His ashes lie at Miidera, but his far-reaching thoughts and the 
ideals which he kindled cannot die. They will, it is my belief, 
continue to burn for many years, and, brightest of all, in the pages 
of this book. 

The Introduction which opens this book has been put together by me 
from notes left by Ernest Fenollosa. 

MARY FENOLLOSA. 




INTRODUCTION 

THE purpose of this book is to contribute first-hand material 
toward a real history of East Asiatic Art, yet in an interesting 
way that may appeal, not only to scholars, but to art collectors, 
general readers on Oriental topics, and travellers in Asia. Its treat- 
ment of the subject is novel in several respects. Heretofore most 
books on Japanese Art have dealt rather with the technique of industries 
than with the aesthetic motive in schools of design, thus producing a false 
classification by materials instead of by creative periods. This book 
conceives of the art of each epoch as a peculiar beauty of line, spacing, 
and colour which could have been produced at no other time, and which 
permeates all the industries of its day. Thus painting and sculpture, 
instead of being relegated to separate subordinate chapters, along with 
" ceramics," " textiles," " metal work," " lacquer," " sword guards," 
etc., etc., are shown to have created at each epoch a great national 
school of design that underlay the whole round of the industrial arts. 



VOL. I. 



xxiv INTRODUCTION 

Again, what has hitherto been written of Chinese Art is rather a 
study of literary sources than of art itself. It is a " history of the 
history," but hardly an effort to classify creative works by their 
aesthetic qualities. The writer wishes to break down the old fallacy 
of regarding Chinese civilisation as standing for thousands of years at 
a dead level, by openly exhibiting the special environing culture and 
the special structural beauties which have rendered the art of each 
period unique. 

The treatment of Chinese and Japanese Art together, as of a 
single aesthetic movement, is a third innovation. It is shown that not 
only were they, as wholes, almost as closely inter-related as Greek 
Art and Roman, but that the ever-varying phases interlock into a 
sort of mosaic pattern, or, rather, unfold in a single dramatic movement. 

We are approaching the time when the art work of all the world 
of man may be looked upon as one, as infinite variations in a single 
kind of mental and social effort. Formerly, and even recently, artists, 
and writers seem to have taken their point of view through partisan- 
ship. Classicists and Goths flew at each other's throats. We hold to 
the shibboleth of a " style." So Oriental Art has been excluded from 
most serious art history because of the supposition that its law and 
form were incommensurate with established European classes. But if 
we come to see that classification is only a convenience, valuable 
chiefly for chronological grouping, and that the real variations are as 
infinite as the human spirit, though educed by social and spiritual 
changes, we come to grasp the real and larger unity of effort that 
underlies the vast number of technical varieties. A universal scheme 
or logic of art unfolds, which as easily subsumes all forms of 
Asiatic and of savage art and the efforts of children as it does accepted 
European schools. We find that all art is harmonious spacing, under 
special technical conditions that vary. The spaces must have bounds, 
hence the union of harmonious shape with proportion. The eye 
follows the bounds, and the hand executes them ; hence line, which 
thus becomes the primary medium for representation. The relative 
quantities of light which they reflect to the eye become another 
differentiation in the spaces, and the harmonious arrangement of these 
values involves a new kind of beauty (not an] and a new faculty to 
create ideas in term of it. Lastly comes quality of light or colour, 
which, at the hands of one born with the faculty, is capable of 



INTRODUCTION xxv 

endless differentiation and creative grouping. So much all the visual 
arts may and do possess and work out through varied material, but 
all pictorial art and representative design come to use their elements 
with a vaster wealth of combination and suggestion due to subject. 
Delineation and its possible instruments restablish wide ranges of 
quality; the significance of notan for modelling, for rendering planes 
of distance, and for local tone, is as vital as its decorative beauty ; 
colour also may relate to hosts of physical facts. There are millions 
of ways of combining these many kinds of beauty and these many 
species of suggestion ; the history of art records the ways heretofore 
tried. But in all these efforts we find some sort of order, due to 
the similarity of effort in the human spirit and in the incidence of 
the social environment. So Gothic passes out of Classic and into it 
again, and Greek methods are carried across Asia also. In this book, 
too, the similarity of the great Chinese methods of delineation with 
the brush to our methods of drawing and etching is first perceived. 
Also the relation of Oriental notan on the one hand to Greek notan,, 
then to Venetian notan, then to the notan of Rembrandt and Velasquez, 
lastly to the notan of modern French movements, is a conspicuous 
fact. There are great points of resemblance in mediaeval colour, too, 
in both hemispheres. The chief differences lie in methods of repre- 
sentation, and this resemblance seems to increase as we approach the 
present day. In the main there is a sort of convergence of the 
two separate continental lines of advance in art. Since 1853 the 
two have been partially intermingled, and from now on this must be 
more and more the case. Whistler is in some sense the common 
nodule. It is thus of vital, practical concern that the points of 
unity should be emphasized, and a history of Oriental Art written 
from a universal point of view. 

The English writers, such as Dr. Anderson, have almost invariably 
criticised Chinese and Japanese art from the point of view of what they 
call realism. Thus, to their eyes, all Chinese art is distortion and 
affectation. Japanese art culminates with Okio and Hokusai because these 
artists seem nearer to the European. The French have a truer view, yet 
even they would like to maintain a barrier between pictorial and decorative 
art, and relegate Oriental to the latter category. The present volume is 
written from the point of view of principles of criticism which could be 
applied to the history of European art as well. Qualities of line, notan, 

c 2 



xxvi INTRODUCTION 

and colour, and the use of these in expressing great ideas, are made the 
basis of classification and of appreciation. 

As far as I know this is the first time that a treatment of so vast a 
subject as a whole has been attempted. However partial the result such 
treatment must give an impression of social forces caught together in a 
splendid single sweep. And though the character, the individuality, so 
to speak, of the different epochs may seem unlike, the parts belong together, 
and will interlock. In the minds of present writers, Japanese and Chinese 
civilizations are too often opposed, or else the Japanese is regarded as a 
mere copy of the Chinese culture. Neither of these views is correct. It is 
one great working of the human mind under wide variations, like that of 
early classic art in Europe, Asia and Africa, when the three came closest at 
the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea. 

If this book is to have permanent value one phase, perhaps the most 
important, must lie in its unity and brevity. It is, indeed, a single personal 
life-impression, and I desire to have this thought of it, in the minds of 
readers, an ever-present one. Being such, it needs to aim at no encyclo- 
paedic completeness, and I shall at my own discretion subordinate small 
facts to large. Some readers will surely complain that too much is left 
out. To these I would suggest that the omissions are, themselves, of 
great significance. My constant effort must be to keep the parts in 
just proportion, and to do this nothing but my own sense of proportion 
can be consulted. 

Nor do I attempt to treat all forms and phases of Art, but only 
imaginative or creative Art. Art may be looked upon as a con- 
tinuous effort, a solid material manufacture that persists through the 
ages, and that never languishes ; but this sort of Art is, for the most 
part, classical and uncreative, and will be found to borrow all its 
motives and its forms from rare creative epochs. My intention, and 
one which I believe will render an important historical service, is to 
treat the creative periods only. In this way we see the separate shining 
planes of movement of the human spirit. With this thought it seems 
to me neither unjust nor improper to ignore all minor movements. It 
becomes a study of relative importances. It may be called, by others, 
a mere personal appreciation, but has there ever been, or can there be, 
a synthesis that is not personal ? 

Most writers upon Oriental Art have, as I said, preferred to classify 
by the technique of industries. Separate chanters or whole books deal 



INTRODUCTION xxvii 

with the material arts ; but while this may be satisfactory for technique 
or for material, it is, if the subject be indeed Art, a false classification, 
full of repetitions, cross lines, and anachronisms. Art is the power of 
the imagination to transform materials to transfigure them and the 
history of Art should be the history of this power rather than the 
history of the materials through which it works. At creative periods 
all forms of Art will be found to interact. From the building of a 
great temple to the outline of a bowl which the potter turns upon his 
wheel, all effort is transfused with a single style. Thus classification 
should be epochal, and in attempting thus to treat it for the first 
time it becomes possible partially to trace style back to its social and 
spiritual roots. The former method may be called that of the curio- 
collector, the latter, of the student of sociology. 

With another class of writers who treat of Art its history becomes a 
history of documents, or, as I have already called it, a " history of a 
history." This is specially true of Oriental Art. No one denies the 
importance of documents, but, on the other hand, no one can assert 
that documents are Art. Documents may sometimes be falsified; Art, 
in a certain sense, cannot. Art should be judged by universal standards, 
and in Oriental criticism waves of opinion, often contradictory, may be 
traced. Chinese Art is far from being a single manifestation. It is formed 
of many, with many battling moods ; and often the conservative Chinese 
scholars have misunderstood and belittled the really creative movements. 
Also, they have failed at times to realize that it is a dangerous tendency 
to mistake interest in inscriptions for interest in significant Art qualities. 
Here the antiquarian and the critic must necessarily diverge. Indeed so 
entirely does the critic rely on his intuitive and, so to speak, creative 
faculties, that " scholarship " in art seems almost a contradiction. 

Let me say at once that I make no claim to being a scholar. Chiefly 
because of this I have hesitated, for many years, to attempt this volume. 
I cannot pretend to original philologic research in Chinese and Japanese 
documents, so scholars might well counsel me to keep silent. But the fact 
of my having had unique opportunities for the study of Far Eastern Art 
cannot be gainsaid. For many years now my friends have been urging me 
to put a part, at least, of these experiences into permanent form. If I now 
yield it is because I believe that I have something to say that is worth 
saying, and feel moved to do it before I die. My special opportunities 
for the study of Art in Japan came in a most interesting transitional 



xxviii INTRODUCTION 

period. The strongholds of the great feudal lords, or " Daimyo," 
were being broken up and their ancestral treasures scattered. In Boston 
I had studied Art as a philosopher, and had also attempted the practice 
of it. Here, in Japan, I became regarded as an antiquarian, an 
authority, and before many years was appointed a Japanese commissioner 
for research, administration, and Art education. 

In the performance of these duties I was thrown with all the well- 
known connoisseurs, visited all important temples, knew the remaining 
artists, and was in touch with all public and private collections. 
Besides this, I became personally acquainted with all dealers in Art, 
and knew their stocks. But specially I became the personal pupil in 
criticism of the remaining Kano and Tosa artists, and, a little later, of 
the Shijo in Kyoto. I studied intimately their great collections of 
copies, and was taught their traditions. Probably because in many 
cases I have chosen to adhere to these inherited traditions the modern 
school of young Japanese critics, which prides itself upon being radical, 
is inclined to call me over-conservative. There is no doubt that future 
study, if seriously carried forward, will change many estimates, but if 
we waited for this nothing would ever be written. Later generations 
must build on the earlier, and I believe that my unified impressions, 
even if defective, must have a value. 

The question of the Roman-letter spelling of the Chinese and 
Japanese names and of their pronunciation may lead to some confusion. 
This is especially true of the Chinese. By most European scholars 
these are written in modern Mandarin. This is, necessarily, a purely 
modern pronunciation. The Japanese way of pronouncing the names 
of old Chinese artists is based upon the older Chinese speech, preserved 
intact by the phonetic nature of the Japanese syllabary. It is thus 
inevitably much nearer to the old Chinese. This may be further 
proved by the translations, into the Japanese syllabary, of old East 
Indian names, which, in their own land, have to-day an unchanged 
pronunciation, and by rhymes in old Chinese poetry, which is as well 
known to all educated Japanese as are Homer and Virgil to the 
English undergraduate. It is perhaps natural that our European and 
American Sinologues, who have won their mastery of modern Chinese 
sounds by hard study, should not wish to give them up. But it is 
also natural tiiat Japanese students, and foreigners who have studied 
Art in Japan, feeling that they possess the truer sound, and having 



INTRODUCTION xxix 

done a large amount of critical work, and made strong efforts to 
assist in the preservation of Chinese Art, should hold to theirs. Chinese 
Art of most periods is still to be studied in Japan, and the Japanese 
themselves feel that it is their privilege to interpret Chinese Art to 
the world. Therefore I shall follow, in the main, the use of the Japanese 
sound of old Chinese, referring in brackets and in the Index to the 
Mandarin pronunciation. It is no slight matter, too, that the Japanese 
sound is less harsh and forbidding than the Mandarin, and stays the 
more easily on the tongue. 

The theory here propounded of elements of change and growth 
in Chinese culture may seem to some readers quite rash, and perhaps 
insufficiently insubstantiated. I plead guilty to the charge of being 
dogmatic. This fact of change and of individual force at all points 
is so universal a background or medium, like the air we breathe, that 
I have to assume it without waiting for proof. It is, after all, a 
much more natural presupposition than the one so generally and so 
lightly taken, that China has remained at a dead level for hundreds 
of years. To stop in the course of my impressions and attempt to 
enforce each minor point that might possibly arouse opposition, would 
result only in confusion. After all, I am not necessarily writing this book 
for scholars, but for those who would try to form a clear conception 
of the essential humanity of these peoples. The idea may be a grand 
hypothesis ; it surely would never be promulgated by the scholars, 
but I believe it to be necessary that someone should attempt it. 
Once granting this point of view it revivifies for us all Chinese insti- 
tutions, philosophy, art, prose-literature, and poetry. It is sound 
evolutionary doctrine. I fully confess that my personal contribution 
to the evidence is a digest of the art itself, the primary document. 
Art is a sensitive barometer to measure the buoyancy of spirit. 

Beyond this I must rest on the scholarship of my Japanese 
colleagues. For nearly thirty years I have had the constant and minute 
assistance, by way of teaching, interpretation and translation, of such 
men as Dr. Ariga Nagao, Baron Hamao, Viscount Kaneko, Professor 
Inouye, Mr. Hirai, Mr. Tatsumt, Professor Nemoto (the greatest living 
authority on the Y-King), and last, but not least, Mori Kainen (the 
powerful Professor of Chinese Poetry in the Imperial University). 
Other scholars to whom I owe tribute might be enumerated by the 
dozens. Marco Polo is surely worth something. 



xxx INTRODUCTION 

In bringing this Introduction to a close I must give one word of 
warning that may be needed by even an indulgent reader. In 
attempting to make this a work of social forces as well as of Art it 
may happen that the social and artistic periods are not quite synchronous 
with the political names and dates, since the causes group themselves 
with slightly different incidence. Thus the Tosa movement already 
begins in late Fujiwara, before the Kamakura Shogunate is established. 
On the other hand, the Ashikaga form of Chinese Art does not come 
in strongly until some time after the founding of the dynasty. Moreover, 
if we are careful, we should see that all these movements overlap, and 
frequently run parallel. Thus the Zen movement has already begun 
at Kioto and Kamakura long before its flowering in Ashikaga, and 
side by side with Tosa genre. Also in Tokugawa, many waves, large 
and small, over- and inter-lap. So that chronology alone is not the 
key to classification. It is, of course, the inner flow of real causes 
that we follow. It will not be found necessary to dwell upon the 
persistence of old schools through the days of their successors. Even 
Kose has come down to our day with Shoseki. It is not names but 
powers that we deal with. Our plan is to take the most creative and 
dominant work of a period and describe it as the chief affair. 

After all, all classification must be false. History is an individual 
series of complex manifestations. To label parts of these under universal 
categories is deceptive. Yet we have to proceed by noting broad 
differences, and we must not confuse the effect by taking too much 
time to correct the error by overlaying the broad with a host of minor 
considerations. It is all a question of proportioning, like Art itself, 
and I have to decide upon how to produce what I deem just effects. 




Chinese Painting 



I ' ""i ' ; i 

30OO 2COO irvAA 



CONTENTS 



VOLUME I. 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. PRIMITIVE CHINESE ART. PACIFIC INFLU- 
ENCE ........ i 

II. CHINESE ART OF THE HAN DYNASTY. 

MESOPOTAMIAN INFLUENCE ... 17 

III. EARLY CHINESE BUDDHIST ART. FROM THE 

HAN DYNASTY TO THE TANG . 28 

IV. EARLY COREAN AND JAPANESE BUDDHIST 

ART. SUIKO PERIOD .... 45 

V. GRECO-BUDDHIST ART IN CHINA. EARLY 

TANG . . . . . 73 

VI. GRECO- BUDDHIST ART IN JAPAN. NARA 

PERIOD ....... 90 

VII. MYSTICAL BUDDHIST ART IN CHINA. TANG 

DYNASTY . . . . . . . 1 1 6 

VIII. MYSTICAL BUDDHIST ART IN JAPAN. FUJI- 

WARA PERIOD . . . . 143 

IX. FEUDAL ART IN JAPAN. KAMAKURA PERIOD 169 



ERRATA. 

Page 43. line 7. ruul " Seirioji" for " Seiroji." 
Plate facing page 34, read " Seirioji " far "Serioji." 
Pago 43, 66, 69, etc., read " naive "far "naive." 
Page 76, line 12, read " Mausolos " yfcr " Mausolas." 
Plate facing page 74, rwrf " Mausolos "far " Mausolas. 
Page 91, line 35, read " Kanimanji"yW " Kanemanji." 
Page 136, line 25, read "it" for "in." 
Page 153, line 31, read "it" for "in." 
Page 197, line 4, read "cite" for "show." 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

VOLUME I. 

IN COLOUR. 
PORTRAIT OF PRINCE SHO TOKU 

DETAIL or THE FRESCOES AT HORIUJI 
DETAIL OF THE FRESCOES AT HORIUJI 
FROM THE TWENTY ROLLS CALLED " MIRACLES or KASUGA " 

Owned ty the Imperial Household af Japan. 



Frontispiece 

TO FACE PAGE 

45 

90 

1 68 



IN MONOCHROME. 

NEW ZEALAND HOUSE, SHOWING TOTEM POLKS 6 

ANCIENT CHINESE BRONZE, SHOWING SLANTING EYES 6 

LONG-NOSED WOODEN MASK, FROM THE PHILIPPINES 10 

ANCIENT SHINTO MASK WITH LONG NOSE 10 

CLAY " CHAFING-DISHES " FROM SHELL MOUNDS 10 

WAND, OR DOUBLE FAN, USED BY NATIVES IN DANCING 12 

CANOE ORNAMENT 12 

CARVED HANDLE OF LIME SPATULA 12 

British Museum. 

ALASKAN BLANKET, WITH EYES 12 

THREE-LEGGED CHINESE BRONZE 14 

OLD CHINESE BRONZE 14 

CHINESE BRONZE WITH LONG-NECKED BIRD 14 

PRIMITIVE FORMS OF THE FISH OR MARINE MONSTER, THE ANCESTOR OF THE 

CHINESE DRAGON 14 

HAN VASE WITH RAISED BAND OF SLENDER ANIMAL FORMS 22 

Mr. Freer. 



xxxiv LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 

TO FACE PAGt 

CLAY "CHAFING-DISH" DESIGN: FORMS OF CATTLE IN FULL RELIEF 22 

HAN MIRROR WITH TWELVE-POINTED STAR, FROM KINSEKI 22 

HAN JAR WITH COVER REPRESENTING MOUNTAIN RANGES 22 

FIVE EXAMPLES OF STONE CARVING 26 

EASTERN GATE OF SANCHI TOPE 30 

ONE OF THE BUDDHIST LOTOS THRONES, OFTEN CALLED "MOON STONES" 32 

From Ceylon. 

EARLY STATUE OF BUDDHA 34- 

At Serioji, ntar Kioto. 

BRONZE FIGURES ON A PRIEST'S STAFF-HEAD 4 & 

THE " FIVE KOKUZO " 42 

At Toji, Kioto. 

THE FAMOUS COREAN TAMAMUSHI SHRINE AT HORIUJI 4& 

DETAIL OF PAINTING OF TAMAMUSHI SHRINE 4& 

Horiuji. 

PAINTING ON THE DOORS OF THE TAMAMUSHI SHRINE 4& 

THE COREAN STANDING KWANNON WITH A VASE 5 

Still on the great altar of tht Kondo of Horiuji. Front and profile views. 

THE VERY ATTENUATED BRONZE SEATED KWANNON OF CONTEMPLATION 50 

At Horiuji. 

PORTRAIT OF SHOTOKU-TAISHI AND HIS TWO CHILDREN 5* 

By the Corean Prince Ala. 

KONDO ALTAR TRINITY <> 

By Tori Busshi, at Horiuji. 

THE CHUGUJI KWANNON 6* 

By Shotoku- Taiiki. 

BRONZE STATUETTE, SHOWING CLEARLY THE GREEK INFLUENCE 66 

Temple of Horiuji. 

BRONZE TRINITY, WITH SCREEN 6& 

Horiuji, Nara. 

DETAIL OF SCREEN FROM THE BRONZE TRINITY AT HORIUJI 70 

STATUE OF MAUSOLOS 74 

STATUE OF BUDDHA AS AN INDIAN PRINCE 74 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. xxxv 

TO PACK PAGE 

GROUP OF HEADS FROM THE LAHORE MUSEUM 76 

STATUE OF A SCYTHIAN EMPEROR 70 

BUDDHIST CARVINGS FROM KHOTAN 80 

KHOTAN BODHISATTWA, SLIM TVPE 80 

PAINTING FROM KHOTAN, FIGURE ON HORSE 80 
SMALL STATUE OF BUDDHA CARVED IN STONE AMONG GREEK ACANTHUS LEAVES 8 a 

CLAY HEAD OF A BOY DUG UP AT KHOTAN 84 

By permission of Dr. Aurel Stein. 

THE SOFT CLAY STATUE OF BUDDHA SEATED 86 

At Udtumasa, near Kioto. 

BRONZE BUDDHA AT KANIMANJI 92 

DETAIL OF FRESCOES AT THE TEMPLE OF HORIUJI, NABA 94 

GRECO-BUDDHIST SCULPTURES IN STONE 94 

From tht Crypt of the almost vanished Temple of Gangoji, in Nara. 

THE BODHISATTWA STANDING AT THE LEFT OF THE YAKUSHIJI TRINITY 96 

From the Black Bronte Trinity at Yakushiji. 

YAKUSHIJI BLACK BRONZE TRINITY SEEN IN PROFILE 98 

THE " KAGENKEI," OR HANGING BRONZE DRUM 100 

At the Shinto Temple of Kasuga, Nara. 

A MASS OF BROKEN STATUES AND INTERESTING REFUSE 100 

Suck as was found ty Professor fenollosa in the year 1880, at Shodaiji. 

THE SANGETSUDO "MACE-THROWER" AT TODAIJI io 

LARGE CLAY FIGURE OF A BODHISATTWA, SOMETIMES CALLED "BONTEN" 102 

Temple of Sangetsudo. - 

SEATED LACQUER FIGURE 104 

Now in the Tokio Fine Arts School. 

THREE HUMOROUS IMPS 106 

At Kofukuji. 

PANEL FROM THE GREAT BRONZE LANTERN IN FRONT OF THE DAI BUTSU 

TEMPLE AT NARA 108 

PAINTED DESIGNS FROM SHOSOIN no 



xxxvi LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 

TO FACE PAGE 

DESIGNS PAINTED ON LEATHER FROM SHOSOIN no 

PAINTINGS ON THE BACK OF MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS CALLED "BIWA" n* 

OUTLINE OF THE BUILDING KNOWN AS SHOSOIN 114 

MIRROR FROM SHOSOIN 114 

SILVER EWER, SHOWING A DESIGN OF A WINGED HORSE 114. 

At Horiuji. 

FAMOUS PAINTING OF A WATERFALL, SAID TO BE AN ORIGINAL 120 

By Omakitsu (Wang Wei). At the Temple of Chishakvin in Kioto. 

FAMOUS KWANNON 122 

By Enriuhin (Yen Li-pen). Mr. Charles L. Freer. 

STANDING KWANNON 13* 

By Godoshi (Wu Tao-tzu). Collection of Mr. Ckartts L. Frter. 

GODOSHI "SHAKA" i34 

tlr. Charles L. Freer. 

THE MONJU OF TOFUKUJI 136 

By Godoihi ( Wu Tao-Ttu). 

RAKAN HOLDING WAND i4 2 

By tke priest Ztngetsu Daishi (Kuan Chiu). At Kodtiji. 

PORTRAIT OF A PRIEST '44 

By Koto Daishi. 

LAUGHING ANGEL WITH BIWA (DETAIL) 146 

By Kobo Daishi. 

EARLY CHINESE BUDDHIST PAINTING 148 

Collection of Mr. Charles L. Freer. 

WOODEN IMAGE OF FUDO I S 

By Koto Daishi. 

WATERFALL 

Kanawoka. 

PAINTING IN THE GODOSHI STYLE OF KANAWOKA, OF ONE OF THE SHI TEN O, 

FORMERLY AT TODAIJI, NARA 

Now in the Fenollosa- Weld Collection. Boston. 

ONE OF THE HELL SERIES, "EMMA'S JUDGMENT" 160 

By Hirotaka. Copied by Hirotaka, Sumiyoshi. 

A BUDDHIST TRINITY : AMIDA WITH ATTENDANT BODHISATTWA, KWANNON, 
AND SEISHI 

By Yeishin Sozu. 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. xxxvii 

TO FACE PAGE 

SUNRISE AMIDA 164 

By Yeiskin So*u. 

TEMPLE OF BIODOIN 166 

BATTLE OF THE BULLS 174 

By Tata Soja. 

PORTRAIT OF YORITOMO 176 

By Takanobu. 

THE CASTLE or KUMAMOTO 180 

* 

DETAIL OF THE HELL PANORAMA 182 

By Nobuzane. 

DETAIL FROM KITANO TENJIN ENGI (two prints) 184 

By Noffutattf. 

DETAIL OF SCENE AT TEMPLE STEPS 186 

Nobuzane. 

THE COCK FIGHT i8& 

By Mitsunaga. 

"A SURGICAL OPERATION" 190 

From one of the rolls of the " Nenchiu Gifgi." By Mitsunaga 
Fenollosa- Weld Collection, Boston. 

BUDDHA DESCENDING THROUGH CLOUDS 190 

From the Talma Mandara, Keion. 

"THIS FINE PROCESSION TAPERS OFF LIKE A CADENCE IN Music" 19* 

From the Keion Roll. Fenollosa- Weld Collection, Boston. 

"FLIGHT TURNING A CORNER" 194 

From Keion's Panorama Roll of the Hogen Heiji War, 
Fenollosa- Weld Collection, Boston. 

PORTRAIT STATUE OF ASANGBA 19$ 

At Kofukuji, Nara. 

PORTRAIT STATUE OF A PRIEST . 19$ 

Nio 198 

By Wunkei. 

PORTRAIT STATUE OF WUNKEI 198 

PORTRAIT STATUE OF Hojo THE FIFTH OF THE KAMAKURA GUARDIANS 198 

THE KASUGA LANTERN-BEARER 20* 

By Katun. Jfasuga Temple, Nara. 



CHAPTER I. 
PRIMITIVE CHINESE ART. 

Pacific Influence. 3000 B.C. to 250 B.C. 

NO national or racial art is quite an isolated phenomenon. It is 
like a great river, the distant rills from which it derives its 
waters being hidden. The origins of all civilizations are 
swallowed up in mystery. We do not know the early migrations of 
human beings upon this globe, nor can we even conjecture what causes, 
operating in remote millenia, have divided them into such markedly 
contrasted races. We can only penetrate a short distance backward 
from the fringe of the known into the thick darkness of the unknown. 

One added difficulty in such research is our proneness to adopt and 
follow easy lines of classification. As if universals were anything more 
than convenient names for prevalent tendencies ! Forces of upheaval 
and change always precede the calm that lends itself to generalization ; 
and it is these transition periods which give the lie to popularly accepted 
history. 

In the true scientific study of ancient Art this same obstacle of 
accepted categories lies across our path. The very specialization of 
archaeological study leads us to consider types as things hard and fixed. 
Where Greek art merges off into something else, we do not like to 
follow it. We boast of " pure Greek art " as if it were the outcome 
of a law prescribed by heaven. We do not like to admit that the 
generation which precedes say Phidias or Michael Angelo stores and 
handles the supreme force which the new-comers, perhaps, waste. It is 
a paradox, but true, that the culmination comes just before the cul- 
mination ; just as it is true that the alien influence lies at the very core 
of the national. 

A very real addition to our resources in these difficult lines lies in 
the " document " of Art itself. Epigraphy records facts about Art, but 
only Art records Art. Thus, a careful following of the movements of 
VOL. i. c* 



2 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

art forms, through even the most unpromising channels, often opens 
up paths about which history is silent. Man is a very pungent, pene- 
trating essence, which, in the course of a hundred thousand years or so, 
has diffused itself into every geographical cranny, and, despite lack of 
resources, has opened primitive lines of commerce throughout the globe, 
British tin is used for the making of bronze by prehistoric races on 
the Black Sea. Sea-shells from the Gulf of Mexico are ground into 
the pottery of Minnesota savages. 

All this is borne strongly upon the mind which takes up the subject 
of a real history of East Asiatic art not a curio-collector's compendium, 
mind you, but a tracing of unique lines of cause. " China is China," 
that is enough for the professed sinologue. To find evidence regarding 
it outside of its own forbidding records, is what they cannot conceive. 
How China became China is what they never ask. " East is East and 
West is West, and never the two shall meet," so runs Kipling's specious 
dictum ; and American orators use it to-day to affect our treaty legisla- 
tion. But the truth is that they have met, and they are meeting again 
, now ; and history is a thousand times richer for the contact. They have 
I contributed a great deal to each other, and must contribute still more ; 
they interchange views from the basis of a common humanity ; and 
humanity is thus enabled to perceive what is stupid in its insularity. 
I say firmly, that in Art, as in civilization generally, the best in both 
East and West is that which is common to the two, and eloquent 
of universal social construction. Translate China into terms of man's 
experience, and it becomes only an extension of the Iliad. 

There is an Odyssey, too, in Chinese art and life, an unwritten 
Odyssey of the Pacific, where, for five thousand years or more, upon 
those vast silent waters the carved canoes of maritime races have cut 
lines of commerce from island to island, and from continent to continent. 
The bulging broken contours of East Asia could not avoid the currents 
of waters and of men, whose relics are strewn, like wreckage, half 
around the globe, from the Fuegian coast of South America to the 
Aleutian Archipelago, and from Khamskatcha southward to Tasmania. 

It must always be considered, of course, in how far primitive men 
evolved similar forms through the very poverty of their resources. This 
must be specially true of methods : materials to carve on, and metals, 
stone or shell to carve with ; but not so clearly true of art forms. 
That all men should conventionalize in adapting pattern to domestic 



PRIMITIVE CHINESE ART 3 

industries is intelligible ; but not that they should reach identical patterns, 
and with the same aesthetic key to the spacing. Art, after all, in its 
largest sense, lies in a peculiar, harmonious use of spacing, in which 
value consists not in laws or classifications, but in uniqueness of effect. 
We may allow much to concomitant evolution ; but not everything, 
especially when lines of traffic are more or less obvious. 

Taking a Mercator projection map of the world, with its centre in 
the Eastern part of the Eastern hemisphere, bounded on the west by 
Europe and Africa and (as Asiatic appendages) extended on the east 
over Australasia and the Pacific Isles until the very western shores of 
America are included, we can get a bird's-eye view over about all 
the geographical formations of human art. Only the Atlantic and 
the eastern half of America is alien to the grouping, a sort of barren 
region that would separate the outer edge of our map if it were wrapped 
about a cylinder. Looking down now into the fertile regions of man's 
work, where continental pathways and Mediterranean proximity of shores 
have invited access, we are enabled to make a large but sufficiently 
accurate identification of the most active centres of art-dispersion within 
this large field, which indeed we are ordinarily accustomed to conceive 
as one. Making a very broad generalization, it may be said that these 
centres have been two : one belonging to the somewhat contracted 
regions about the east end of the Mediterranean, where the continents of 
Europe, Asia and Africa come to a common corner, as it were, and 
where boundary stakes are necessary. The other belongs to some point 
of the many less defined Mediterraneans enclosed by the large islands of 
the western half of the Pacific Ocean. Whether it lie in the long strip 
of sea which separates the semi-continent of Australia from New Zealand, 
New Guinea and Borneo, or in the warm expanse that stretches between 
Borneo, the Philippines, Cochin China and Formosa, or in the colder 
currents that skirt North China, Corea, and Japan, or yet in the frozen 
seas off the Amoor's mouth, and bounded by Behring's Strait and the 
Aleutians, we cannot surely determine, but that in one of these it must 
have originated seems by far the most rational hypothesis. Wherever 
its origin, it had northern drives, and southern drives, and eastern 
drives from island to island across the ocean, until it reached American 
shores. The hypothesis here adopted, but for which there is no oppor- 
tunity for me to present all the evidence, is of the existence of a 
substantial unity of art forms, caused by actual dispersion and contact 



4 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

throughout the vast basin of the Pacific, and includes the arts of Peru, 
Central America, Mexico and Alaska, as well as those of Hawaii, 
Micronesia, Macronesia, and the early inhabitants of Formosa, China, 
and Japan. I thus believe that there exists what we may fairly call 
a " Pacific School of Art," and that it is quite sharply differentiated 
from the schools of all other parts of the world, never penetrating far 
to the west of a longitudinal line drawn from Central China to Borneo. 
So much for the Eastern centre of dispersion. 

To go back now to the Western centre, we seem justified in 
speaking of it also, in a sense, as one, since the mutual influences of 
its adjacent parts have so clearly acted and interacted as to make a 
sharper pointing unintelligible. The three main areas of this centre 
are the Mesopotamian plain, the Northern Nile Valley, and the Greek 
Mediterranean ; the influences between which, throughout long periods 
of time, have been mutual and multiple. We see their interaction 
specially formulated in Cyprian art. Alexander's conquest, 300 years B.C., 
almost merged them into a common sea of forms. 

If it be objected to this theory of world distribution that it leaves 
India out of account, the answer is that Indian Art, in all of its high 
reaches, at least, is dependent upon Mesopotamian : first Babylonian, 
then Persian, then Greek, Greco-Baktrian, and Greek again. Whatever 
native motives may have filtered into India's prehistoric industries are 
only like tiny rills flowing to feed the main Western current. 

Such feeding rills are to be traced, too, over the outskirts of 
established European and African arts. Greek art did not stand alone, 
but leaned upon early barbarous motives that flowed down from the 
Tartaric centre of its continent, possibly from Scandinavia also, the lake- 
dwellers, and even the remote cave-carvers on bones of the hairy 
mastodon. So Egyptian Art must have received ancient infusions of 
motive from the same far African sources that yield us to-day the 
spirited drawings of the Bushmen and Berin bronzes. The Eastern 
Mediterranean was thus a primitive centre of confluence long before its 
creative efforts had made it also a centre of dispersion. All later 
European art grows up, by cuttings as it were, from this concentred 
stem ; and so also the beginnings of creation in modern America draw 
from the same life. 

The special value to us of this theory of two centres lies in the 
striking fact that Chinese art is the only large form of world art 



PRIMITIVE CHINESE ART 5 

that has combined in itself creative impulses from both. The key to 
early Chinese art is as follows : its earliest motives were influenced 
by Pacific art, and these were later overlaid by forms of the 
Greco-Persian. Of course this is quite consistent with the fact that 
Chinese art, like all great schools, still later must have experienced 
ferments and achieved powerful reaches of advance from causes 
operating within. 

I have prepared for use throughout this book a chart, graphic and 
chronological, of Chinese Art as a whole for five thousand years, 
showing its ups and downs, its periods of creative vitality, its central 
supreme culmination, and its slow final fall. This is probably one of 
the first comprehensive views that has ever been given of Chinese 
culture as a growing and a vulnerable essence, as contrasted with our 
ordinary false conception of its dead-level uniformity. We shall see in 
these pages how Chinese art came to make and unmake itself. 

Looking carefully at the chart it will be seen that the art takes 
its obscure rise somewhere in the earlier part of the third millennium 
before Christ, rises to its first faint wave of force with the Shang 
Dynasty about 1800 B.C. ; to its second with the Chow Dynasty 
about 1 100 B.C. ; to its third and stronger creative effort with the 
Han Dynasty in the second century before Christ ; then, after an 
interval ascends slowly and firmly to its highest apex under the Tang 
Dynasty in the eighth century, and again to a second hardly lesser 
culmination under the Sung Dynasty in the eleventh and twelfth 
centuries ; at last to fall from that point slowly and doggedly, and 
almost without break, to its present low level of weakness and 
degeneration. Such is the amazing outline like a great ground-swell 
of human power, almost as slow-moving and irresistible as the storm- 
waves in the earth's crust that have lifted and depressed continents. 
It will be noted how late in time the culminations appear, contem- 
porary, in fact, with the efforts of Charlemagne to re-collect the shattered 
forces of Rome. 

The smaller line traced above the main one is the similar graphic 
curve of Japanese art reckoned upon the same time-scale, but on a 
smaller scale of elevation. This Japanese art, while it also appears 
late in time, is evidently not centred into a single overmastering 
wave, like the Chinese, but appears dispersed into five successive and 
distinct ones, of almost equal creative vitality. The relations between 



6 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

these and the corresponding periods of Chinese work form the very 
ground-plan of this present effort to write their common history. The 
chart should be referred to at every phase of the unfolding story. 

Turning now to a special map of the Pacific Ocean, with its 
island chains like stepping stones in half a hundred directions, let us 
trace briefly a few of the salient features of Pacific design, and show 
how closely they seem to be imitated by the earliest Chinese art. 

The history of Pacific life and art in remote times is not directly 
known to us, on account of the perishable nature of the materials 
used ; but it is a fair presupposition that the primitive forms used 
to-day by these simple Polynesian races do not greatly differ from 
their lost predecessors. Most of these Pacific arts are fixed and 
traditional. But it is of the utmost importance to find that the very 
oldest forms of Chinese design, preserved to us in bronze, are in the 
majority of cases nearly identical with the bulk of the island 
decorations. Now here we have a fairly definite date to which we 
can carry back the use of Pacific forms upon this globe, namely the 
beginnings of Chinese history, somewhere between 3000 and 2000 B.C., 
probably nearer the former ; and while one cannot say that the Chinese 
species give us the oldest and most original forms of this genus, we 
can safely conclude that we have a clear term of five thousand years 
at least in which to account for the slow dispersion of such forms 
from one or more centres throughout the Pacific half of the globe. 
Between New Zealand and Hawaii curves a long stretch of sea ; yet 
at a remote time its dangers were mastered by some dusky Ulysses in 
Greek-shaped helmet of cocoanut, who has left the kinship of his 
language to add to the proof of racial descent. Of course, I am far from 
claiming that blood descent has always or generally accompanied the 
enormously wide transmission of art forms. I am not required to 
prove that the peoples of Peru, Alaska, China, and New Guinea were 
genetically related. It is enough for my purpose to assert that, at least, 
they communicated, and left behind the evidence of borrowed arts. 

So again we can trace but clumsily a few of the probable lines 
of this communication. Whether the South American forms, for 
instance, passed over our continued island stepping stones from west 
to east across the South Pacific, or whether they worked down the 
coast from North America, we shall not here attempt to determine. 
Yet, surely between our North Western Indians, say of Vancouver and 




NEW ZEALAND HOUSE, SHOWING TOTEM POLES. 





ANCIENT CHINESE BRONZE SHOWING SLANTING EYES. 



PRIMITIVE CHINESE ART 7 

Alaska on the one hand, and the Amoor or Ainu races on the other, 
;here must have been much community of blood. That the Eastern 
branches of the Malay race derived designs from the Polynesian, does 
not of course prove miscegenation ; but it is clear that there is some 
degree of consanguinity between the Philippines and the Japanese. How 
much weight should be given to tales of Chinese migration voluntary 
or involuntary to American shores, is still obscure ; but it is practically 
certain that the movement of all these forms was, in general, eastward ; 
little or no return influence from America being traceable in Western 
Pacific forms. 

It would be interesting also to conjecture how and where the 
Chinese first entered into the charmed circle ; whether, indeed, in 
their sheltered abutments upon the Yellow Sea they may not even 
have originated the movements, which then spread southward as well 
as eastward. For other reasons it may seem more probable that the 
ancient centre lay in the south, possibly in lands now submerged, and 
that the general trends of dispersion lay north and north-east, move- 
ments in which the more materially advanced Chinese races eventually 
shared. But all such difficult problems must be left to the anthro- 
pologist ; and his decision may depend upon the study of winds and 
ocean currents. And, since I am not writing a history of Pacific art, 
it is not necessary for me to force any conclusions. 

Leaving behind us all such fascinating, if fruitless speculations, let 
us identify some of the common features of Pacific art. Prominent 
everywhere we find the suggestion of faces more or less human, with 
two staring eyes and eye-balls in the centre. Upon the lintels and 
rafter ends of New Zealand huts, and upon the totem poles at their 
entrance, for all the world like those in the far-away regions of Alaska, 
we find these faces carved ; and it is a striking feature that almost 
universally we find these staring eyes slanted at a decided angle, similar 
to but much more pronounced than the natural eye-slant of Mongolian 
races. Where upon handles of utensils, or in full relief statues, these 
faces form logical parts of heads, we can see that many of the pattern 
marks represent tattooing. Passing farther north we find that this 
general Macronesian feature is dominant in the art of New Guinea, 
which in some respects shows more advanced and more Chinese 
aesthetic forms. The bands of design that play about the features 
interlock closely in finely spaced planes of relief, something like the 



8 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

knotting of early Celtic art. The specimens of similar tattooed heads 
that have come from the Philippines, show eyes of less angle, perhaps, 
but with a more consciously demoniac expression, as if the spirit 
represented lent evil force to the use of the dagger whose handle it 
decorates. This eye form, too, appears modelled upon the sides of 
Aztec pottery, and sometimes with lines of bosses that suggest deriv- 
ation from tattooing. This pair of eyes is the most conspicuous feature 
of Alaskan art, worked as patterns on blankets, and carved or painted 
on the prows of boats, as we still can see in China of to-day. 
Everywhere, probably, these eyes denote "spirit," or an animistic 
symbol of vital use in summoning specific supernatural aid. Demonic 
force plays below the surface of almost every domestic function. 

Now it is a most striking fact that a practically identical use of the 
face forms, the slanting almond eyes in pairs, the relics of marks of 
tattooing, and the bosses, appear as the most salient features upon the 
majority of ancient Chinese bronzes. It seems never to occur to the 
professed Sinologue that the presence of these various forms may be 
related to similar appearances in the art of the island peoples. He has 
found in old Chinese tradition that this face, seen so often on Chinese 
bronze, is only the " T'ao tieh ogre," who is a glutton with a canni- 
balistic appetite. Given a name, the phenomenon is familiarized to him, 
and filed away in a mental pigeon-hole. But this very tradition, prob- 
ably one out of many from forgotten remote ages of Pacific relationship, 
only confirms the theory of connection. These very bronzes were used 
probably for the cooking and serving of food and drink in the most 
ancient forms of ceremonies for the dead the origins of " Ancestor 
Worship " ; and what is more natural than that the face, or pair of 
eyes the symbol of the active domestic spirit should appear full of 
desire to eat and drink ? Here, we may well conjecture, is the very 
spirit and source of altar-food conception. 

It is true that in the very scanty records we cannot find any 
evidence among the earliest Chinese of Pacific connections. Indeed, no 
one knows where the race came from. A Western origin, from the 
direction of the Caspian, has been vaguely and vainly conjectured. All 
we know is that the earliest Chinese lived in the North, and near the 
sea about the lower reaches of the Hoangho^occupying a very 
limited area. It is impossible here to enter upon any adequate account 
of Chinese history. There are Chinese myths of heroic ancestors and 



PRIMITIVE CHINESE ART 9 

leaders who taught the elements of industry and of agriculture. When 
we catch our first glimpse of the Chinese under their patriarchal 
Emperors (from B.C. 2852 to 2204) they were settled along the 
Hoangho, with a capital probably near Kaifonfu, somewhat inward from 
the sea, and were working out the details of material civilization. 
One of these early founders, Huwangti, is clearly recorded to be a 
foreigner leader of a cognate tribe, perhaps irrupting from some 
remote region, and bringing with him higher arts and a more com- 
plete organization. This, too, is the time of the invention of written 
characters, which superseded the making of records with knotted cords. 
It is quite possible that the most primitive of the bronzes go back 
to this day. 

The early Chinese believed in spirits spirits of the dead, of 
nature, and, above nature, of heaven. There was a ruler in heaven, 
like a tribal leader on earth. The people acted primitive dances, 
and made offerings to these beings, some of whose faces we probably 
see upon primitive utensils. The forms of these earliest bronzes are 
rude and heavy : the patterns are set upon them with only partial 
assthetic effect, the bare symbolism remaining of primary importance. 
In this the art differs from advanced Polynesian modes and the best 
of the Aztec, where the aim is more polished and the effect charm- 
ing, like the next stage of Chinese work. 

The former accounts of the first Emperor of the so-called Hai 
Dynasty follow B.C. 2205 to 1 707 the great Yu, who first made 
the Emperorship hereditary. We do not realise how democratic 
Chinese institutions originally were ; like free tribal organization every- 
where, and the self-governing village commune. Yu, with his pre- 
decessors Yan and Shun, have been taken by later philosophers as 
idyllic leaders in an age of golden peace, and set up as ideals to be 
followed. This was done especially by Confucius, nearly two thousand 
years later. At least moral order was already aimed at the self- 
governing of the earnest individual. For the material welfare of the 
land they fought with their primitive engineering methods against the 
unruly forces of the Hoangho, and they glorified agriculture. There 
is no clear record of the use of human figures in the art of this 
period. Primitive, unglazed pottery was almost surely known. China 
was not yet China, only a peaceful and prosperous, order-loving 
tribe, quite unconscious of its great destiny. Fishing and hunting 

VOL. I. D 



io EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

alternated with agricultural pursuits, and whatever maritime tribes lay 
near the coast, the Chinese must have touched. Our only art records 
are their rarely dug-up bronze utensils. 

Another Pacific feature in the decoration of these bronzes is the 
fish, or marine, monster, the ancestor of the Chinese dragon, which 
is identical with forms found from South Pacific Islands to North- 
Eastern America. This sea-creature has a head unlike a fish, with 
curved snout, opened nostrils, sometimes with tusks, and a curving tail 
also unlike a fish. Yet it is often found in connection with forms that 
are clearly fish-like. It occurs in New Zealand and Micronesian art, 
carved on the handles of utensils, gourd bottles, and woven into stuffs ; 
and it reappears in almost identical form in Alaskan patterns. Its 
shape, identical on the early Chinese bronzes, is probably their dragon ; 
only we see here that a " dragon " means no lizard monster of 
Western tradition, but a semi-fish-like or possibly seal form evidently 
a spirit symbol connected with water. This figure is carved or 
moulded on all parts of the oldest Chinese vase. In later forms 
appear the tusks, which are more like those of the Aztec stone 
dragon. 

Another widespread Pacific form, akin to the pair of eyes, is the 
mask, detachable, and to be worn by men or priests in impersonating 
the spirits during ritual. Here we refer to a universal practice 
recorded for us in the Roman word persona, or mask. But the Poly- 
nesian and Malay masks have the slanting eyes, the tattooed faces 
. and the ogre-like features of the totem poles ; and in addition possess 

strange, elongated noses, which sometimes take on the form of a 
beak. In New Guinea, Borneo, and the Philippines we find these 
masks, sometimes representing murderous spirits, in the Philippines 
especially, with enormous noses. Now, although we have no primitive 
Chinese masks preserved, we do find among the earliest Japanese 
masks, used in the Shinto sacred dances, identical, though more 
beautifully-carved forms, with the long nose, the bird-like beak, and 
the slanting eyes. In Alaskan Ritual art these figures become 
accentuated in the enormously projecting beak of the bird mask. 
Among Aztec and Hawaian masks we find sockets, in which movable 
pieces, such as the jaw or the eyelid, were set, just as in some of 
the Japanese Shinto dragon-spirit masks. This dragon-world under- 
neath the sea is part of Primitive Chinese myth. 





LONG-NOSED WOODEN MASK 
FROM THE PHILIPPINES. 



ANCIENT SHINTO MASK WITH 
LONG NOSE. 





CLAY CHAFING DISHES FROM SHELL MOUNDS. 



OF THE 
UNIVERSITY Of 



PRIMITIVE CHINESE ART n 

Still another more special form of parallelism in ornament is the 
frigate-bird pattern, so conspicuous in the finest assthetic carving of 
New Guinea. There, through centuries, it has become conven- 
tionalised into lovely spiral bands, which we find identically repro- 
duced on some of the ancient Chinese bronzes. 

It is here worth while to speak of the help we derive from the 
work of Chinese archaeologists. Cultivated mandarins of the Han, 
Tang, and Sung dynasties have been great collectors of antiques, 
and have written and published illustrated accounts of the pieces 
which they had before them. Doubtless they had evidences of 
relative age hardly accessible to us ; yet we can see that their 
critical judgments were largely based upon the literary characters 
which were even then frequently inscribed, or raised in relief, upon 
the base of such bronze utensils. These collectors had access to 
thousands of pieces, where we can see but a few tens at most ; and 
the printed reproductions in early editions, of which the Ming are 
now the oldest accessible, cut from wooden blocks, are marvels of 
careful execution and beautiful printing. I shall hereafter use several 
of the reproductions from the Hakkodzu (30 volumes), written by 
Oho, of the Sung Dynasty, and Kokodzu (10 volumes), edited by 
Rotaibo, of Sung. Yet it does not follow that we must accept all 
the dicta of these books without further criticism, as some of the 
Sinologues are inclined to do. On the whole, however, we shall find 
a great deal of consistency in their massing of patterns according to 
dates. Only a few plates in the Hakkodzu and other books are 
ascribed to so ancient a time as the periods of Hia and the pre- 
ceding first Emperors. 

The second such sub-period of the first great Pacific period in 
Chinese art comes in with the Shang Dynasty (B.C. 1766 1122). 
Little historic record is left of this period, but if we judge from the 
study of original bronzes of the type ascribed in the Chinese book to 
Shang, we can believe it to be an age of greater polish and more 
advanced art. The shapes of the bronze vessels have now become 
specially plastic and beautiful ; severe and strong in design, with 
simple, firm outline, and of a dignity and variety which make even 
Greek vases look somewhat thin. Much of that tradition of fine form, 
which led to repetition after repetition through all the Chinese and 
Japanese after periods from which more or less accurate copies we 

D 2 



12 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

derive our popular notions pf Chinese beauty in bronze comes down 
through the ages from this remote time. 

Not only are the forms among the grandest that human art has 
left us, but the execution is worthy of the design. The handling of 
the hard substance has become an exquisite art, the design is in lower 
relief, and the surface has a wonderful satin finish, which in existing 
originals seems now inlaid with drops and bars of green, blue and 
crimson jewels, a slow chemical incrustation from the alloyed metals. 

The patterns, often of much intricacy and grace, are still clearly 
Pacific, but of a symbolism now frankly cut away from its roots, and 
persisting chiefly for its decorative opportunities. The face pattern is 
now smaller, used chiefly for handles and points of accent ; the dragon 
forms have become conventionalized into richer and more bulky curves, 
and the whole design tends to an interlacing of flat bands, sometimes with 
straight lines as a basis, but always with some strong, high-tension curves. 

As might be expected, this aesthetically modified Pacific pattern is 
made to play with great nobility into the severe shapes of the vessels 
it decorates. This is the golden age of primitive Chinese spacing ; 
the ornament not over-elaborate or too accented, and often leaving 
large cool surfaces of unbroken bronze between the bands. 

Another important point to notice is that some of these bronze 
vases seem clearly to point to clay types that must have preceded 
them. Not only are the metal shapes plastic to the last degree, but 
they exhibit at times tne very air-holes for draught in cooking which we 
find is characteristic of primitive unglazed pottery vessels in Japan 
and China. 

The consideration of this rude pottery is now upon us. There 
seems reason to believe that its home in China is rather towards the 
south, which was as yet unconquered by the tall black-haired Chinese 
on the north, but with whom, doubtless, there was early trade. The 
aborigines of what is now Central and Southern China belonged 
largely to races far different : Shan tribes related to Burmese, and 
diminutive Miao-tse (who still live apart among the hills) more allied 
to the primitive Japanese. 

In the shell-mounds of Japan are found large quantities of vessels 
of a bluish unglazed clay, tall in form with a long hollow stem, 
above which rises a bulging central receptacle. Often a cluster of 
smaller covered vessels are built into the piece, suggesting the common 



FRIGATE BIRD DESIGNS FROM NEW GUINEA. 




WAXD, OR DOUBLE FAN, USED BY 
NATIVES IN DANCING. 





CANOE ORNAMENT. 



CARVED HANDLE OF LIME SPATULA. 
British Museum. 




ALASKAN BLANKET, WITH EYES. 



PRIMITIVE CHINESE ART 13 

cooking and eating of the domestic meal. Slashes and holes near the 
bottom and top of the hollow stem suggest that the latter must have 
been filled with some kind of fuel, for the draught and smoke-escape of 
which these orifices gave vent. The vessel was thus an oven, a boiler, 
and a whole dinner service in one. 

As I have already indicated, some of the finest Shang bronzes 
seem to be built on this model ; the splendid bowl on a short stem, 
owned by Mr. Freer, appearing to be a veritable "chafing-dish," with 
two large handles precisely like those of the present day. Here the 
forms of the smoke-orifices are made to work beautifully into the 
trend of the ornamental design. 

Another feature of the prehistoric Japanese pottery, and probably of 
the Chinese also, was the distribution upon parts of the surface, some- 
times crawling up the stem, sometimes set upon the large central globe, 
of rudely but strongly modelled clay effigies of animals and birds ; 
often turtles, frogs and lizards ; but sometimes, also, horned cattle, 
dogs, and horses. Whether the significance of these forms was to 
suggest the origin of the flesh substances in the cooking ingredients, 
or whether it may have had some totem or other symbolical significance, 
it is hard to say. But it here appears that a Southern and Eastern 
school of naturalistic sculpture in clay was arising at some early age, 
and that it had no relation at all to Pacific design. That this animal 
school led to later bronze work that can be identified as Han, we shall 
see in Chapter III. Whether any Shang work of this type in either 
bronze or clay now remains can only be determined after much close 
comparison has been made of the scanty fragments. But the evident 
relation of some Shang bronzes to the type of clay vessel that bears 
these animals suggest that such may have existed. We think then that 
we detect in Shang the first traces of a Southern realistic art working 
slowly up against the Northern Pacific patterns. 

It will be interesting, before leaving the meagre relics of Shang, 
to compare the patterns with other well-known Pacific forms. It is 
not now with the ruder of these that analogy is clear, as is the case 
with the earlier Hia bronzes. It is rather with the more polished and 
aesthetically complex forms of New Guinea, New Zealand and Aztec art 
that the parallelism now holds. For example, the triangular interlacing 
of the bands upon Mr. Freer's Shang bronze is almost identical with 
motives carved in stone upon the fa9ades of Mexican temples. 



14 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

The third sub-species of Chinese primitive art is that of the Chow 
dynasty, which followed the Shang (B.C. 11 22-^249). With the Chow 
founder, the great Wen Wang, we are already upon pretty firm 
historic ground. This acute personage, whose name means " King of 
Literature," was the first great Chinese author and philosopher. It 
was he who composed in prison the original core of the Y-king, or 
Book of Changes, which Confucius much later elaborated. In this 
work the symbolism of " dragon " categories is so bound up with 
imperial acts as to be the origin of all that is still implied in the 
terms " dragon-throne," " dragon-face," " dragon banner." In a sense 
the dragon is the type of a man, self-controlled, and with powers that 
verge upon the supernatural. Wen Wang's life, too, is the starting- 
point for Chinese poetry, the Book of Odes, mostly Chow productions, 
which Confucius collected, and some of which are supposed to eulo- 
gise the deeds of early Chow monarchs and of virtuous members of 
their families. 

The only art which, to my present knowledge, remains from this 
age is still the bronzes. Judging from the many Chinese drawings 
and the few originals, the pattern of these is still remotely Pacific, but 
much modified, and interspersed with realistic designs. Moreover, the 
shapes of the vessels themselves are either of bird or animal forms, or 
else over-elaborate and too consciously aesthetic. The pattern is apt 
to be overloaded and grotesque in its disposition. In short, the Chow 
seems to be an age of aesthetic decay, as, soon after the earlier reigns, 
it became the seat of political decay. The strong empire of the " King 
of War," son of the " King of Literature," was broken by the seventh 
century into a ring of semi-independent feudal states. It was the 
special mission of Confucius,* librarian to the Duke of one of the 
smaller states, to bemoan the weak politics and morals of his day, and 
to suggest a strong reconstructive system, based upon the idyllic 
life of the patriarchs who had preceded Hia, and upon the virtues 
and philosophy of Wen Wang himself. This Confucian philosophy, 
which advocated a thorough-going Socialism curbing the individual to 
act for common ends, though much discussed in later Chow, did not 
become the basis of administration in China until the next great age, 
the Han. 

* Confucius, called generally in Japan " Koshi,' 1 in modern Mandarin pronunciation 
" K'ung-tzu," born 550 or 551 B.C., died 478 B.C. 








THREE-LEGGED CHINESE 
BRONZE. 



OLD CHINESE BRONZE. 





CHINESE BRONZE WITH 
LONG-NECKED BIRD. 



PRIMITIVE FORMS OF THE FISH "OR MARINE 
MONSTER, THE ANCESTOR OF THK 
CHINESE DRAGON. 



OF Thf 
UNIVERSITY 0, lu 



PRIMITIVE CHINESE ART 15 

Nearly contemporary with Confucius appeared another great sage, 
this time from the just awakening and half included South (the Yangtse 
valley), Laotse, who advocated as thorough-going an Individualism as 
Confucius did Socialism. The absolute freedom of the Ego is the first 
principle of Laotse* and from this he would develop a more internal 
morality than can be mechanically deduced from utilitarian ends. Thus 
we have set here, clearly opposed in Chinese life, the two main types 
of man which have created the dramatic unity of Chinese history, by 
the growing complications of their warring. Which at first appealed 
with the more force to art it is difficult to decide. Confucius's thought 
of a social harmony which should literally reproduce the structure of 
music is sublime and fertile. " Keep your mind pure and free through 
Art," he writes. Also he advocated the setting up of painted or carved 
portraits of great men to stimulate a popular ambition ; but whether 
there ever were such paintings and sculptures in Chow we do not, at 
present, know. 

On the other hand, Laotse's very South, the land of freedom and 
natural beauty, was already celebrated for its plastic arts, and has always 
possessed " temperament." It is pretty clear that this Taoist individ- 
ualism was one of the greatest forces that rendered a later high Chinese 
art possible at all. And even at the end of the Chow dynasty, we 
have in parts of Kutsugen's great Southern poem, " Riso," or the 
" Lamentations," elaborated description of a splendid, ancient, non- 
Chinese shrine in the far South, covered with symbolic paintings of 
forgotten gods. Kutsugen's was the first great outburst of poetry, 
and strongly Taoist, after the Chinese Odes, which are Confucian. It 
is the first great demonstration, too, of Chinese literary imagination ; 
but we can only conjecture what new beginnings of visual art may 
possibly have accompanied it. 

There is one striking record in the middle of Chow of a first tentative 
exploring by the Chinese of land lying to the west of their empire. About 
600 B.C. the adventurous emperor Wa Tei, with a large retinue, is said 
to have penetrated as far as the Kunlung Mountains which divide Thibet 
from Kotan, and there to have met a kind of magical central Asian 
"Queen of Sheba," the " Mother-Queen of the West," who entertained 
him in magnificent state. Whatever the measure of truth in the story, the 

* Laotse, called in Japan "Roshi;"in Mandarin pronunciation " Lao-tzu," flourished 
from 580 to 530 B.C. 



1 6 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

marvels of a new life and work there seen, expanded into later myths and 
legends much as early Greek geographical accounts of outlying nations 
are like truth seen through a romantic mist so powerfully affected Chinese 
imagination that the far western site became identified in later Laoistic 
worship with the Taoist heaven. Probably some new elements in visual 
design arose from this contact, which it is difficult now to identify. 

The end of Pacific art and of the weakened Chow dynasty came together 
with the advent of the Shin tyrant who overthrew the alliance of the 
feudal states, and subjugated them into the first colossal Empire that 
included what is now the whole north and centre of China proper. He 
brought the past consciously to an end, because he wished to rebuild with 
clean stones ; thus causing the burning of all past books, especially those 
which dealt with the endless disputations of the Confucian and Taoist 
philosophers. If there were any philosophy at all in this brief meteoric 
career, it was a sort of Nietscheism backing raw freedom and force against 
formalism. Another of his colossal works, less futile, was the building of 
the great wall for 1,000 miles across the north, to shut out the predatory 
hordes of barbaric Huns, ancestors of Attila's scourges, which already had 
begun to threaten China with Tartar invasion. 

Probably no new forms of Art could have been introduced during the 
short reigns of this strenuous man or his son, as he left his subjects 
little time for the luxury of zstheticism. His is an age of transition, a 
needed stepping-stone from feudality to Empire, but leaving all real social 
reconstruction therein to the genius of the Han Dynasty which soon 
succeeded him. (202 B.C.) Here an entirely new set of forces make 
their entrance into Chinese life, and particularly into Chinese art, which 
now takes on new forms, so unrelated to the Pacific that we must devote 
to them a special chapter. 



CHAPTER II. 
CHINESE ART OF THE HAN DYNASTY. 

Mesopofamian Influence 202 B.C. to 221 A.D. 

THE rapidly expanding influence of China upon surrounding peoples 
must have reached our Western world of the Mediterranean 
precisely at this dramatic moment ; for though the violent Tsin 
dynasty lasted only forty years, it contributed its name Sin, or Chin ; 
and Sines, Sinico, and so the final form "China," to the earliest accounts 
of it written by the Greek geographers of the Ptolemaic school. A little 
later, the second century B.C., China became known to the Greco- Roman 
world under an entirely different epithet, the Ser, or Seres, a people far to 
the north-east, from whom was brought by caravan route the precious 
fabric known by the Greek-formed adjective Serika or Serik, whence our 
word silk. The strange fact is that the scholarship of Europe conceived 
these two peoples to be entirely distinct, an error which was not finally 
corrected until the explorations of the Jesuit missionaries in the seventeenth 
century. What is significant for us in this is that the difference of names 
corresponds to a difference of the routes by which Western travel moved 
the Sin fame and exports coming by sea around through the Indian Ocean to 
Arabia at least ; the Ser products being carried overland on the backs of 
camels. This difference and its long persistence in the Occidental imagina- 
tion really correspond to an important and even a racial difference between 
the North of China and the South. The North, the Seres, were the 
descendants of the ancient black-haired race in its original bleak seats ; 
the South, the Sines, were only just becoming known to the Chinese, 
being loosely incorporated with their empire under Tsin, more firmly 
under Han. By South, however, we mean also what is now the centre, 
the Yangtse valley, and the whole eastern projection of Chinkiang, the 
famous province of Wu (Go). It was from the ports of this new 
province in the neighbourhood of the present Amoy or Hangchow that 
the first maritime trade was opened to the South and West, though later 
the still more southern ports in the Canton region came to rival them. 



1 8 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

But our concern here is still more strikingly with the fact that while 
the short-lived Tsin gave its name to the Southern and maritime 
Chinese, the whole overland line of trade between China and the Greco - 
Roman Empire which lasted down to the conquest of the Turks was 
opened for the first time by the Tsin's great rival and successor, the Han 
Dynasty. It is peculiarly the Han, in its sudden wonderful expansion 
Westward, that represented the Seres proper, the men who made that 
mysterious substance, silk. 

The Han Dynasty came in with great eclat, and the refinements of 
ripe military power, in a violent national reaction against the excesses 
of Shin. The responsibilities of extended Empire were now for the 
first time understood, for the small areas and the patriarchal 
supremacy of tribal heads in earlier days, from Hia to Chow, should 
hardly be dignified with that name. It was now that the first great 
historic wave of Chinese culture surged up into a shining spray of 
forms. There was, first, the intense and widespread literary criticism, 
which reconstructed the texts of the ancient books destroyed by the 
Shin tyrant ; much as the scholars of Florence, sixteen centuries later, 
re-pieced the scattered fragments of Classic culture. Here comes in the 
first critical study of the language itself, its grammar, its etymology, its 
epigraphy, works of which some of the most important still remain. 

This recovery of the works of the great Chow philosophers, 
Confucius and Laotse, and of their followers who had warred 
for eight ineffectual generations, led to new conscious attempts at 
administrative organisation, based upon broad social principles, the 
digests of which the new Han rulers had ready to hand. Speaking 
briefly of this long, fertile period of a hundred years, we can say 
that at the beginning of Han the Taoist, or Individualist, party 
achieved a partial triumph, which was followed by the first definitive 
formulation of Confucianism as an Imperialist constitution at an era 
considerably ante-dating the birth of Christ. That society should be 
organized as a great, obedient family, with multiform duties but no 
personal rights a sort of ethik-archy or government by Socialistic 
morality was the beginning of characteristic Chinese form as we 
know it ; a form, however, in which the most striking institutions, such 
as the civil service examinations, were yet far from initiation. 

The philosophy was rather a convenient engine for the Han rulers 
to wield in defence of their dynastic power than a ripe expression of 



CHINESE ART OF THE HAN DYNASTY 19 

thought and life in the Chinese people themselves. Here then, too, 
in Han, the first great national histories were compiled and written, 
trying to throw into an intelligible whole the fragments of tradition 
that had filtered down through many motley centuries. 

The poetry of Han, however, a noble mass of work, remained 
largely Taoist or Individualistic, enforcing the prime fact which all 
later Chinese critics, and their European Sinologist pupils, have 
ignored, that almost all the great imaginative art work of the Chinese 
mind has sprung from those elements in Chinese genius, which, if not 
anti, were at least non-Confucian. This poetry is almost always in the 
Southern romantic style of Kutsugen in his Riso, as opposed to the 
primitive short-lined moralising Chow balladry of Confucius ' compilation. 

The causes which soon led to the expansion of Han influences 
towards the West were twofold ; first, military, the outcome of success- 
ful campaigns against the various Tartar tribes on the north and 
north-west, and the coming into more intimate treaty relations with 
these hordes of Scythians and Huns ; and second, philosophical and 
romantic interest in the Taoist stories of the West, stories which had 
descended in a halo of myth from the visit of a Chow Emperor to 
the " Queen-Mother of the West," four centuries earlier. It was 
especially the monarch Wutei (Butei), the sixth of Han, who ascended 
the throne 140 B.C., to rule for fifty-four years, and whose long 
reign may be called the golden age of this dynasty, whose military 
prowess and restless Taoist imagination led him to inaugurate the 
Turkestan campaigns. He summoned about him the Individualistic 
genius of his day, professed to believe in and share the Taoist 
mystical powers, and determined to re-visit the Queen of his Taoist 
paradise. The first overtures were peaceful, Wutei sending an envoy 
ostensibly to discover the line of migration to the far West of one of 
his dependent Scythian tribes, the so-called White Huns. The envoy 
traced them, after years of detention and difficulty, to the far highlands 
of Baktria, where he came into contact with the Persians and the 
Greeks, and whence he brought strange treasures of Western manufacture, 
the knowledge of grape culture, and a , fine breed of Turkestan 
horses. Other messengers from Wutei, followed by armies missions 
that were renewed at times throughout the breadth of the Han 
centuries not only carried Chinese civilization and arms past the 
Kunglung mountains to the very Pamir plateaus, but opened intercourse 



20 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

with the Mesopotamian plain, penetrating as far as the Persian 
Gulf, from which one Chinese general later prepared to embark on a 
Red Sea voyage to Alexandria. And thus it was that a permanent 
caravan trade across vast deserts and the roof of the world was estab- 
lished between China and Rome a hundred years before the Christian 
era. The enormous mass of silken stuffs which the wealthy Romans 
used for clothing all came from the far-away looms of Han, in return 
for which the Chinese imported glass and enamels, steel, pottery, 
elephants and horses. This was the first great line of world trade 
over the central regions of our globe. 

That an enormous impression should have been made by this new 
intercourse upon the industries and arts of China, is natural enough. 
The Han people might well discard much of the worn-out Pacific 
motives, of whose origin they retained no real knowledge, and adopt the 
more fertile ideas which were pouring in from the West. The 
strangest fact, perhaps, is that the contact did not reach to deeper 
intimacy, and a more perfect mastery of Western forms. Here China 
must have touched the outer surface of a Greek art that had followed 
in the wake of Alexander's conquests, and of all the treasures of a rich 
Babylonian, Assyrian and Persian past. Some European writers, indeed, 
have gone so far as to infer, from the vague indications of literary 
research, that Han art became very decidedly Greek, at least in its 
early days. It would seem more strange that we do not find clearer 
direct evidence of Greek tutelage, were it not for causes which tended 
to make this continental intercourse fitful and abortive. Why should 
not the two great empires of the world, China and Rome, have met, 
affiliated, and established diplomatic intercourse, and we be able to 
read of Chinese long-robed mandarins at the courts of the Caesars ? 
The enormous length of the trade-route, occupying some two years in 
circuit, explains much ; but the deeper cause was the jealousy of the 
Western intermediate people, chiefly the Parthians, who kept the two 
ends of the four chains of trade in their own hands. It was the 
rivalry of such " go-betweeners " that prevented the embarkation for 
Alexandria of the Chinese general, and, roughly speaking, we may say 
that the great and celebrated Parthian wars of later Rome were fought 
chiefly to effect and to obstruct direct intercourse with this most im- 
portant Eastern market of the Roman world. The sea-trade of the Sins, 
vid India, was obstructed by Arabs ; while the land-trade of the Seres, 



CHINESE ART OF THE HAN DYNASTY 21 

via Ferghana, was definitely obstructed by Parthian success. Thus the 
full vitalizing contact was never made until the weakening powers of both 
Rome and Han destroyed for centuries all chance of it. And thus it 
was that into the art of Han infiltrated only a somewhat motley group 
of Western influences for China to transpose to her own alien uses. 

It will be worth while now briefly to consider what were some of 
these Western art forms which, in an imperfect intercourse, would have 
been the most easily transportable. In older forms of Mesopotamian 
art, Assyrian and Babylonian, and later in Persian, the Chinese must 
have noticed the strong prominence of animal motives ; not only bands 
of animals horses, deer and lions used in ornaments of utensils, and 
often disposed in circular procession, but famous scenes of hunting, 
with darting horses of the royal guard, chariots, charging lions, wounded 
animals. Forms of winged animals, too, some with human bodies ; but 
masks of birds or beasts winged bulls and lions as vast symbolic 
ornaments, or perched as capitals of columns ; forms enriched with 
finer Greek influences, as at Persepolis, and even the flying Pegasus 
himself, must have come to the Han notice. Strange branching and 
intertwisting forms of foliage, too the so-called " Tree of Life " in later 
Persian pattern the firm line tracery of stems, and the feathery 
plumage of leaves ; and more than all this the formal Mesopotamian 
use of continued flower and rosette patterns in stiff, doubly symmetrical 
curve system, worked out in their coloured brick fa9ades and interior 
decoration. Here, too, we should have spoken, perhaps first, of the 
use of glazed pottery generally in that greatest of all ceramic centres, 
Persia, and in the Tigris and Euphrates joint valley. Upon some of 
these vases there is a noticeable lack of design, but at times some 
relief work. Among the colours are an egg-plant purple glaze, grey- 
cream, superb blues, and wonderful dark greens. It is still a live 
problem whence came this finest of the industrial arts ; but since the 
recent unearthing of ancient collections of pottery in Persia and along 
the Euphrates, we are coming to believe this the original seat from 
which the arts of enamel spread, in many directions, possibly to China. 
Looked at with a purely aesthetic eye, Mesopotamian design has a large 
massiveness of proportion, and a simple but peculiar circular rhythm of 
curve relations, which distinguish it from all other racial types. Its 
Egyptian analogues are more spiky and rectangular ; its Greek more 
flame and flower-like. 



22 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

But of very special influence upon the new art of Han was 
evidently the peculiar thin and wiry forms of art, half Persian and half 
Greek, which obtained in the semi-independent kingdom of Baktria 
nearly down to the time of Christ. Later Persian forms, seen in 
engravings of figures upon cylindrical seals, have become lank and 
dry, as if the juice of their Assyrian prototypes had been pressed out ; 
and this attenuation of form becomes often combined with effeminate 
Greek rhythmic curves in Baktrian seals and coins. Figures are reduced 
to mere filaments and splinters, which band strange angular intervals 
upon the engraved ground. 

If now we turn from this somewhat random enumeration to the 
few scattered relics of Han art, we can trace something like the revolution 
in Chinese aesthetic forms which we might be led to expect. A first 
great innovation is in the glazed pottery, which, so far as I know, 
did not exist at earlier dates. A considerable mass of this has come 
into modern American collections, most of which is somewhat rude 
and repeatedly conventional, showing a late Han degeneration. But 
studying the finest and most characteristic pieces we shall discover much 
of interest. The forms are largely low cylindrical jars with covers, 
and tall finely moulded vases, with small base, full flaring centre, and 
long neck above expanding into a wider lip. Many of these have no 
ornamentation whatever ; some have only a few faint circles of geo- 
metric marks, often like the cord-marks of primitive pottery. The 
finest bear a single modest band of decoration in relief about their 
equators. That some of these have been derived from bronze forms 
seems proved by their bearing, at two opposite poles of their equatorial 
region, the relics of handles that imply detachment ; face bosses which 
show a relic of the old Pacific design, holding in their mouths a ring 
that should hang free. Other forms, however, and generally the 
undecorated, show affinities with the tall, oven-containing shapes of the 
prehistoric unglazed vessels of the South. But over all these varied 
pieces of modelled clay, harder and more brick-like than the chalky 
Mesopotamian biscuits, has been poured a nearly identical glaze of dull 
green, occasionally mottled with a little yellow, and often running into 
heavy drops as in the finer Japanese pottery. These colours have been 
largely deoxidized by long burial in the soil, fading into a semi- 
iridescent colourlessness ; but the glaze can be traced upon the less 
exposed portions. It would seem as if the Han potters, though 




HAN VASE WITH RAISED BAND OF 
SLENDER ANIMAL FORMS. 

Mr. Freer. 




CLAY "CHAFING-DISH," DESIGN 
FORMS OF CATTLE IN FULL 
RELIEF. 




HAN MIRROR WITH TWELVE-POINTED STAR. 
From Kinseki. 




HAN JAR WITH COVER REPRESENTING 
MOUNTAIN RANGES. 



3H1 



CHINESE ART OF THE HAN DYNASTY 23 

borrowing the idea of design from the Assyrians and Persians, could 
not discover the chemical constituents of their finest blues. It should 
be noted here that, beside the vases and jars, there occur forms of 
miniature domestic utensils and animal effigies, also worked out in 
glazed pottery, and which show evident affiliation witli the prehistoric 
animal culture, often upon the oven vases, of the primitive South. 

Let us now look more closely at the motives upon the Han 
vessels that show decoration in sculptural relief. The covers of the 
jars are mostly heaped into curving ranges of mountains, which seem 
to symbolize the wonderful fourfold pacing of that Pamian roof of 
the world which the adventurous Chinese captains and merchants were 
just learning to cross. The sides of the jars, too, have an underlying 
network of mountain forms in crude curves, like successive sea-waves, 
in very low relief. Occasionally upon the lower slopes of the moun- 
tain, on the cover, we find the sculptured forms of animals apparently 
lying dead in the wilderness figures of horses, cows, or lions. But 
the chief animal and human forms are found in higher relief in the 
side bands of the jars, standing strong against the mountain outlines. 
Here we find men on horseback, hunters ; perhaps wounded lions, 
trailing their hind legs as in Assyrian sculpture ; wild cattle, sometimes 
humpbacked like those on Baktrian coins ; forms of flying birds, and 
inter-connecting traceries that cannot always be identified. Among the 
animals, too, some are winged, quite in the Mesopotamian style A 
strange circumstance were it not for the contact, for in all the old 
Pacific motive, even in that which delineates dragons, whose written 
character-analysis seems to mean " flying-flesh," we find no early 
attempts to portray wings. These animals and hunting scenes, though 
generally not the mountain forms, are found in bands of closer curve 
composition upon the vases also. And upon both jars and vases are 
seen horsemen turning in their saddles and shooting arrows backward, 
which it is perhaps not a wild conjecture to take for Parthians, or 
Central Asian tribes akin to them. 

After the clay vessels we should touch upon the bronzes, which seem 
to divide themselves into three or four types. The first of these, and 
still in use for ancestral rites, are more or less conventional copies of 
the more ancient bronzes of the Pacific school. But these we need 
not consider, being only hierarchic survivals and betraying no creative 
aim. One new form of bronze resembles the glazed vessels with 



24 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

raised patterns on jars and vases, quite like those already described. 
Here the Pacific forms of the handles stand out clear against the 
Mesopotamian motive on the bands. Still a third form is the bronze 
drums, which Professor Hirth has so well shown to have originated 
in early Han. The patterns on these are very different from the 
early Pacific, as from the Northern Han, and seem to point to a 
far Southern, and perhaps a Malay, origin. Such drums have been 
dug up mostly in the South, where the records say that a Chinese 
conqueror originated them, carving native symbolical designs into 
drum forms imitated from the Chinese drums made of wood and 




CHINESE DRUM WITH FROGS. 



skin. The ornamentation is incised in fine line pattern, quite unlike 
the clay reliefs, but surmounted at the top of the drum by rude 
bronze images of frogs in complete relief. We do not know what 
symbolism was played by this animal form, but we can clearly say 
that their modelling is precisely like that of the rude clay figures of 
unglazed prehistoric pottery in China and Japan, and therefore still 
further attests its Southern origin.* A fourth form, of bronze, 
was the mirrors, generally circular discs, the backs of which were 
ornamented in low and high relief. The use of such mirrors may 

* In the spring of 1908, when crossing in the steamer with the well-known 
Dr. de Grote, of Leyden, Holland, Professor Fenollosa had an opportunity of discussing 
many such questions. Dr. de Grote said that among European students of the present 
day it was generally thought that these frogs typefied a desire for rain, and that such 
drums were almost surely used by the priests in invoking supernatural powers to terminate 
a drought. 



CHINESE ART OF THE HAN DYNASTY 25 

have come from Persian or Greek suggestion, but their patterns 
probably did not. Here, however, is a great point of dispute, for 
though a large number of Han mirrors imaged in the antiquarian 
books, and found in collections, are of a mingled curve and star 
pattern, interspersed with inscriptions in Han characters patterns 
which are clearly congeners of all else that we know in Han orna- 
mental spacing there are a few exceptional pieces shown in the 
Chinese wood-cuts, by outline only, and akin to a few actual mirrors 
which we have in our collections ; which I cannot, except for the native 
judgment, find any evidence of belonging to Han. These are the so- 
called " grape and sea-horse " mirrors, where the whole back is closely 
loaded with a most intricate curving pattern in high, carefully 
moulded relief in bands, and a central rosette of branches and 
bunches of the grape, intercurving in a most natural manner, and 
interspersed with delicately-winged flying birds, the inner circles often 
being most graceful ; animal forms of horses, lions, and rabbits, 
cantering about among a network of graceful foliage, the central 
medallion having the same animals in airy circuit, or the strange, 
half bear-like hairy animal called the " sea-horse," of which term there 
is no explanation. The central knob, through a hole in which plays 
the cord that holds the mirror, is generally of this sea-horse, but more 
primitively modelled, more like the frogs upon the bronze drums. 

We come now to the consideration of a quite different set of forms from 
Han art, whose largeness of simple line and space relation are entirely in 
harmony with the vases and bronzes, and whose patterns also show kinship 
to Mesopotamian prototypes namely the famous stone carvings of scenes 
from Chinese history and life, found in several places lining the interior of 
caves in the province of Shantung. These are of enormous value, because 
they are the oldest elaborate representations of human beings remain- 
ing in China, because they are dated, because they illustrate for us 
the whole round of Chinese history and tradition as known to Han 
scholars, and because they give us clear ideas as to the natural 
limitations of Han power in design. Rubbings from most of these 
have been published by Professor Chavannes, and printed from 
wood-cuts in the Kinseibu Sa. 

For the most part these divide themselves into two series, the 
earlier and more meagre of which belongs to the first century 
antedating the birth of Christ. These show figures of men, horses, 
VOL. i. E 



26 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

chariots, etc., incised in lines into the stone, being the earliest 
representations of human life that have come down to us in Chinese 
art. Many horses are sometimes driven abreast, and in the profile 
drawing appear almost super-imposed, as in primitive Egyptian design. 
These horses are not like the little stocky Tartar ponies, with short 
necks and legs, but all full-blooded steeds, high-spirited, head and 
forelegs lifted into lines of proud arch, with much fine rhythm of 
general curve and with good action in the seated figures. Here 
are dramatic scenes clearly modelled upon methods and subjects of 
wall decoration found in Western Asia. This is still more obviously 
the case in the second and much more voluminous series, found also in 
Shantung, and dating from the second century after Christ, that is towards 
the end of the later Han, when the capital had been removed to the 
ancient Chinese seats in the East (Honan). Here we have a complete 
round of illustration of all the important mythical and recorded deeds 
of ancient Chinese history ; the heroes, the patriarchs, the emperors, 
coronations and assassinations, scenes of engineering and of agriculture, 
the visit of the Chow conqueror to the " Queen of the West," the 
early deeds of Han itself; beside a whole menagerie of animal 
forms, frequently representing spiritual beings, flying horses with 
wings and serpent tails, monkeys and imps beings half-human, half- 
animal, with interlacing tails, forming in places net-works of design 
with added whirls of cloud, of hundreds of figures caught into an 
interlaced, wriggling pattern. Most of these seem to be Taoist 
spirits, showing the vigour of that cult even at a day when its 
rival, Confucianism, had been in some sense adapted for government 
administration. These figures are raised in relief upon the stone 
tablets, and so in the rubbings come out into black silhouette. Here 
are hundreds of horsemen and footmen, showing every rank of noble 
and soldier a little compendium of Chinese life at that remote day. 
Considerable change is noticed from the style of the earlier of 
Western Han, in that the horses are now more clumsy, with con- 
ventional fat curves and weaker legs, but still with an attempt to 
render them high-stepping and snorting. The action of the figures, 
too, is very spirited. We can thus conclude that this Mesopotamian- 
derived school of figure representation did not materially change 
throughout the whole length of Han, having become a fixed style, 
of which most of the movements are lost, a style which is quite 








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OF THE 
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS. 



CHINESE ART OF THE HAN DYNASTY 27 

in harmony with the strong and somewhat rude curve systems of 
Han ornamental pattern already noticed. And here finally we can 
see the representation of the sacred Babylonian tree, the " tree of life," 
found in modern Persian carpets, growing clearly in the Paradise 
garden of the Taoist Western Queen. 

In aesthetic respects these horse forms of Han are more spirited 
than any equine delineation of China at a later day, where the native 
Tartar ill-shaped breed becomes the model ; but they are not so fine 
as the superb horse painting of the Japanese Tosa School in the 
twelfth century, described in Chapter IX. This Han art, and 
especially the round of human forms, if studied in close relation to the 
fine mass of Taoist and social poetry, will give us a clear conception 
of the mentality of Han, and prevent our importing into it so much 
that belongs to later Chinese growth. In the latter part of Han 
probably began a thin stream of commercial relations with India and 
the Western ocean. An embassy from Marcus Aurelius Antonius, 
Emperor of Rome, is reported in Chinese annals to have arrived in 
Southern Han; but Professor Hirth believes this to have been probably a 
private venture of Parthian or Arabian merchants, subjects of Roman 
Syria, who assumed the imperial name. Chinese records also show that 
the Han people were well informed as to the structure and defences of 
the Syrian capital, Antioch. 

But the downfall of the later enervated Han was inevitable, not 
only because of wasteful civil wars that lasted for generations and broke 
China up into a second group of feudal states, but through the gradual 
irruption of Tartar tribes from the North, who, scaling the Great Wall, 
snatched province after province of the North from the weak 
hegemony of rapidly changing dynasty, and finally drove what was left 
of Chinese vigour into the safe recesses of the South, near the Yangtse 
and below, where they might recruit their fortunes. In this way the 
unity of Han art was doubtless weakened and lost, though an influence 
that had acquired so much headway could not suddenly cease. But the 
chief reason for making our break here, and commencing a new chapter, 
is that a third great stream of Art forms and motives now began to 
flow into China from a third direction the Southern namely Buddhism, 
with all its complex and important potentialities for later Chinese 
civilization. Chinese art is first Pacific, second Mesopotamian, third 

Indian Buddhist. 

E 2 



CHAPTER III. 

CHINESE BUDDHIST ART TO THE TANG DYNASTY. 

Indian Influence Third Century A.D. to the Sixth Century. 

THE introduction of Buddhism into China from India, and event- 
ually through China to Corea, Mongolia, Manchuria, and Japan, 
was one of those stupendous revolutions, like the carrying of 
Christianity to the Gentiles, which well-nigh obliterate racial and national 
lines, and bring humanity to pay common tribute to spiritual forces. How 
profoundly Chinese and Japanese civilization in general, and art 
in particular, were gradually transformed by this quiet, pungent in- 
fluence, has never been written by any native scholar, and hardly even 
conceived by any European. On the one hand we have the vague 
statement of our geographies that 400,000,000 of Buddhists in China 
alone are to be added to the quota of Sakyamuni's devotees. One 
naturally infers that Buddhist thought and feeling are still to be found 
paramount in all the institutions of Mongolian civilization. On the 
other hand, the impression of actual travellers, and especially foreign 
scholars, in China, is that Buddhism has become there a decayed and 
despised cult, having almost no hold on the educated classes, and 
quite a negligible factor in analysing the spirit of Chinese institutions. 
The standard works on Chinese life and culture almost ignore 
it. The place of Buddhist ideals in Chinese literature is seldom 
discussed ; and the evident necessity of including Indian motive in 
certain phases of Far Eastern art is explained rather as an isolated 
phenomenon. 

That the mass of the Chinese of the present day are devout 
Buddhists, as the Ceylonese are, would be quite a misstatement. The fact 
is that the whole influence of Confucian scholarship and influence that 
is, the force of the whole Mandarin order, is implacably opposed to the 



CHINESE BUDDHIST ART 29 

spirit of Buddhism, and has been from the eighth century, and even 
before. This is why the views of Chinese history, and the estimate of 
relative values among institutions, derived through Chinese scholarship 
and most of our Sinologues drink from that source are entirely false in 
their prevailing attitude, in that Chinese scholarship, lying entirely in the 
hands of the Confucian literati, has always been violently partisan and 
antagonistic. The truth is that a very large part of the finest thought 
and standards of living that have gone into Chinese life, and the finest 
part of what has issued therefrom in literature and art, have been 
strongly tinged with Buddhism. To write the history of the Chinese 
soul without seriously considering Buddhism, would be like writing the 
history of Europe under the hypothesis that Christianity was a foreign 
and alien faith whose re-rooting in Western soil had been sporadic, 
disturbing, and on the whole deleterious. 

How great practical peoples, like these healthy shoots of the Altaic 
race, the Chinese and the Japanese, could ever have taken up with such 
a negative, pessimistic, and non-political religion as the Buddhist re- 
nunciation, may seem to many fairly questionable. The answer is that 
here, too, partisanship stands in the way of truth-seeing. Most of our 
information about the Indian religion is derived from Southern sources, 
Pali, and the whole round of the Ceylonese illumination. It is enough 
for scholars, who sometimes have a missionary bias, that Southern 
Buddhism, the " Lesser Vehicle," being the older (and the easier to 
refute), must lie nearer to the original source, Sakyamuni himself ; and 
is therefore the only form that we need seriously study or consider, 
Northern Buddhism, they think, being derivative, revolutionary and 
corrupt, need be studied only as a perverse curiosity. The great truth 
which they forget is that Buddhism, like Christianity and unlike 
Mohammedanism has been an evolutionary religion, never content with 
old formalisms, but, filled with spiritual ardour, continually re-adapting 
itself to the needs of the human nature with which it finds itself in 
contact. Thus, becoming Northern or positive Buddhism with the more 
vigorous Northern races in the North-west of India, it became still more 
positive, social, and human with the great practical home-loving races of 
China and Japan. 

The attitude of those who would minimize the effect of Buddhism 
in China is self-contradictory ; in that, on the one hand, they ask how 
these sane moral peoples should have adopted a " degenerate Southern 



30 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

pessimism," and, on the other hand, denounce the Northern forms, 
which have been made practical and optimistic by the vigorous contact, 
as " corruptions from the pure original doctrine." The truth about 
it quite corresponds to the commonplace fact in Christian history, 
that our many modern Catholic and Protestant sects, which cannot 
all in spite of their several claims be identical with the primitive 
Christianity of the Apostles have all been sane and broadening 
efforts of the central truth to meet the almost infinitely varying 
forms of human need. English Episcopacy and Puritanism may have 
been equally hateful to a Southerner ; and yet really express sides of 
Christian truth that conform to two powerful strands in the Anglo- 
Saxon race. 

It must be remembered, too, that the introduction of Buddhist art 
into China was a slow affair, comprising in time a vast number of 
the great revolutionary movements within the body of universal 
Buddhism. The date 61 A.D. so often given by writers who rely 
chiefly o;i the written word as the important date of Buddha's introduc- 
tion to the Han Emperor Meitei in the form of a small gilt image 
is of no special importance to us ; first, because we can hardly identify 
the form of the image ; second, because it belonged probably to early 
and still negative forms of Buddhism ; third, because in fact the new 
religion hardly began to exercise appreciable influence upon China and 
Chinese thought before the third century ; and fourth, because we can 
trace no Chinese modifications in Buddhist art, no incorporation of the 
new aesthetic canons, before the third or fourth century. It is from 
these latter dates, after the final fall of the Han dynasty, that it is 
proper to trace the real rise of Buddhist art in China. Let us 
premise once for all that this art is largely sculpture, and that too 
sculpture in bronze, including also those forms of decorated industry 
that entered into temple architecture and ritual. 

But before we begin a detailed study of the course ot this new art 
in the Middle Kingdom, it will be clarifying to preface a brief word 
concerning the little we know of early Buddhist art in the various 
parts of India. The origins of Indian art are lost in obscurity, though 
it seems likely that the transition from wooden to stone forms took 
place as late as the second or third century before Christ. The 
erections and sculptures of that day are regarded as early creative forms 
in Buddhist art. In those we seem to trace at least two different 




EASTERN GATE OF SANCHI TOPE. 



OF THE 
UNIVERSITY OF 



CHINESE BUDDHIST ART 31 

streams of influence, one native and aboriginal, the other exotic and 
largely Mesopotamian. It is not an accidental phenomenon that late 
Persian and Greco- Syrian forms should have entered the China of 
Han at almost the same moment that they were moving south-east 
also to assist in the expression of Buddhist motive. It was all part 
of the dislocation and dispersion and eastward driving that followed 
the great upheaval of Alexander. It was one of Alexander's own 
generals who first visited Central India and brought back to Europe 
accurate accounts. 

This is not the place to attempt the herculean task of dating or 
classifying the movements of Indian art. It is enough for our pur- 
pose merely to note a few of the typical forms that passed over in 
the assthetic transmission to China and Japan. Among the forms 
of native origin must be mentioned first what appears to be a key 
form to Buddhist architecture, which Fergusson has conjectured to 
be derived from the primitive bamboo and bark huts, such as are seen 
to-day among the hill tribes of Central India, notably the Todas. 
These are small and low tents, made by bending flexible poles over 
into a semi-pointed arch, with both ends inserted into the earth ; two 
or more of which set parallel and connected by longitudinal rafters 
make a frame over which can be stretched a covering that approximates 
in form a semi-cylinder. The curve, however, is more subtle than a 
circular segment, since the pole ends are not quite vertical, and the arch, 
though blunt, slightly approximates a Gothic point. How thoroughly 
this form entered into Buddhist architecture may be seen first in the 
cave temples, where the cylindrical nave opens within this arch into a 
fa9ade, often filled with a stone discus representing window openings 
of the same pattern. When independent stone temples were erected, 
these forms still remained for doors and windows ; and are found, too, 
in many of the wooden temple erections in China and Japan as an 
ornamental form for window spacing. 

The dome is but such a cylindrical section projected by revolution 
upon an arch ; and this dome we find in the earliest forms of the stupa, 
or sacred tumulus, and the derivative forms of the altar niche in the 
caves, the diminutive tombs in cemeteries, and the reliquaries in priestly 
treasuries. From this form, too, grew the well-known pagoda which 
in its earliest form, still occasionally found as far East as Japan, is 
merely a tiled wooden roof built over a dome formation, and over the 



32 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

square block member that surmounted it. In such Japanese pagodas 
the dome, shown only above the lower roof in a strip of white plaster, 
is not itself structural, but only an ornamental relic, the square wooden 
framework below being the true erection. A high pagoda is only 
a multiplication of these roofs, which needed not to be always of 
equal space, as shown in the remarkable Yakushiji pagoda near Nara, 
Japan. 

Passing now to features of Indian Buddhist art that are wholly or 
partly imported, we might point at once to the famous stone gateways 
of the primitive Sanchi type, whose wooden architecture seems just to 
be passing into clumsy stone. While the crowded small figures in 
elaborate carving are not specially Mesopotamian, the rosette forms 
set at salient points, and the winged animals, lions and bulls, set on 
the pillars and posts, are clearly of Persian influence. How strongly 
the rosette form recalls Assyrian, even where it had been already attached 
to a lotos centre, is exemplified in the so-called " moon stones " ot 
Ceylon, which are really the lotos thrones, on which the sacred erection, 
dome and terraces and stairways as if as a whole they formed the 
very worshipful altar-piece stand. Here the concentric bands of moving 
animals and birds, intertwined with scrolls of leaf and stem, point back 
to early Assyrian animal motives, and forward to the elaborate mirrors 
and rich halos of the seventh century in China and Japan. 

The Sanchi forms of Indian art, too, were partly incorporated 
with the primitive Chinese conception of the dragon, originally Pacific ; 
and the lotos is only the chief among Indian plant forms that enter 
into later Mongolian symbolism and pattern. 

We come now, lastly, to effigies of Buddha and other spiritual 
beings which form the very core of Buddhistic art. In early Buddhist 
symbolism the human image, as a thing to worship, probably played 
no part, the stupa itself as containing a relic, the wheel of the law, and 
the sacred "Trisul," taking the place of altar-piece. But such severity 
of impersonal restraint probably did not last down to the Christian 
epoch ; for we hear of Buddha's image in China, and the earliest of 
the cave temples have representations of the sacred figure on the altars. 
The most primitive form may well have been a plain naked figure, so 
severe as almost to transcend human contour, and with no ornament 
whatever. But a standard Southern type, which also extended more or 
less through the whole geography of Indian Buddhism, is probably 




in 

m 

i 
H"?- 



a z 

H O 



W " 

O 



CHINESE BUDDHIST ART 33 

given us in those colossal Ceylonese stone figures whose clumsy bodies 
are swathed in a single gauzy robe whose many thin and nearly parallel 
lines of fold sweep like a river of wavy curves over body, arm and leg 
in an expressive ornamental pattern. However simplified and modified 
these lines of drapery become in a hundred later schools, they are always 
present in some traceable form. 

The Bodhisattwa form seems to be equally primitive with the 
Buddha. This is of a graceful swaying figure, seemingly feminine, 
with high tiara set over long flowing locks, and festoons of jewels 
hanging from various parts of the body. The third order of 
Buddhist spirit, the violent deities which correspond to Siva in later 
Hinduism, had not been developed as early as the period of 
which we speak. They derive doubtless from a closer union 
between the Buddhism of the early Christian centuries and a 
revived Hindu mysticism based upon the pre-Buddhist literature. 
We shall speak of these under the mystical Chinese and Japanese 
art of later chapters. The forms of imps, however, or elemental 
spirits lower than man, have already been introduced. 

That there must already have been a split in the Buddhist 
ranks between the more conservative Southern sects and the non- 
Indian races of the North and North-west, the Nepaulese, Cashmerians, 
and the tribes that worked toward Central Asia over the North 
plateaus. Here we find evidence of a different art a Himalayan 
art, a more Mongolian face, a more decorative catching of the folds 
of the garment about the legs, long sweeps of mantle over the 
shoulders, and heavy rosettes and flower festoons upon the hair, 
twined over the breast, or worked into the strong girdle at the waist. 
These forms that have remained are mostly in bronze, and small ; 
and seem to be of a primitive character that would render them 
the common ancestor of Chinese bronzes, and of the later Thibetan 
art. That it was some such statuette that was brought to the Han 
Emperor seems probable; at any rate such statues from the Indus 
valley, or possibly from Turkestan itself, finally striking the caravan 
route from China to the Caspian, came Eastward to the Flowery 
Land as early as the close of Han. 

It should be confessed, once for all, that of the enormous mass of 
primitive bronze statuettes from many Asian sources which have always 
passed among Japanese antiquaries under the name of " Indo-Butsu," 



34 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

or Indian Buddha, it is often difficult to identify the origin. So many 
of foreign make were copied or slightly modified by centuries of workers 
in all Northern Buddhist countries, that which is the true Indian, which 
the Chinese, which the Corean, and which the Japanese, has become 
the great puzzle of the students for the last twenty years. And while 
in many cases we can identify with considerable probability the racial 
element in the school of design, it is often impossible to assert that 
the object which displays this may not be an early copy executed by a 
foreign artist. I am not now speaking of modern bronze copies, which 
can be fairly well distinguished from the antiques ; I am referring 
only to bronze whose certain date must fall between the second and 
seventh centuries. The same is true, to a less extent, of the 
wooden statues. 

The Han dynasty of China fell in 221 A.D. after a long period 
of weakness, which was destined to be followed by a break-up into 
separate feudal states almost as hopeless as the disintegration of the 
Roman Empire which was already commencing. The third century 
after Christ was given over in China to the terrible anarchy involved 
in the sanguinary " Wars of the Three States," a mediaeval age of 
epic heroism, which has been sung in a hundred forms of prose and 
verse, both in China and Japan, and entered as motive into a dozen 
dramas. From this wild warfare issues the colossal shape of a hero, 
Kwan-u, with a sad face and herculean frame, who is still worshipped 
as a Chinese Mars. 

In such confused times it is improbable that any definite move 
toward a new Chinese School of Buddhist art could be afforded. 
The art and the poetry are both confessed off-shoots from the Han 
stem. And the next century became even worse, for now many 
Tartar conquerors, emboldened by the dissensions of the Chinese 
Kingdoms, came down from the North, mingling as mercenaries with 
their employers, quite as the Teutonic people at the same moment 
were enslaving in Europe the Roman army ; until, finally, they were 
able to wrench away from the nominal Chinese Emperor a large portion 
of his Northern tributaries. It is part of the same great irruption that 
was beginning to let loose a tidal wave of the kindred Tartar Huns 
against the Roman Empire. 

So far as we can peer back into the arts of this day, they show 
only a clumsy Chinese modification of the Indian Buddhist types. 




EARLY STATUE OF BUDDHA. At Serioji, near Kioto. 



Of 



CHINESE BUDDHIST ART 35 

The great wooden Buddha of Seirioji, near Kioto, the most primitive of 
all the Southern types of Chinese Buddhas, is probably a Chinese work 
of this fourth century, retaining much of the Han clumsiness and angular 
sharpness of feature, while it turns into a certain symmetrical rude 
decoration the Indian lines of clinging stuff, which it can afford to 
raise into heavier carving upon its wooden surface. The ancient 
tradition is that it is the original contemporary statue of Buddha, 
brought from India to China, whence it was stolen by a Japanese 
devotee who surreptitiously substituted a copy. But such manuscript 
traditions in the records of Japanese Buddhist temples are for the 
most part of no great weight, and we are free to believe this a 
Chinese original modified from some Indian statuette or drawing. 

By the year 420 of our era a decisive change was wrought for 
China, full of the most important consequences for the future of her 
literature and art ; and that was a clear division of the groups of 
Chinese states into North and South dynasties the whole North, the 
ancestral seats, being taken over by Tartar conquerors, and for the first 
time Emperors of pure Chinese race moving their capital down into 
the lately civilised South. This separation, with relatively long inter- 
vals of peace between the two sections, lasted nearly two centuries, 
down to 589. In these two full centuries Chinese culture, including 
poetry and art, entirely re-created themselves. 

Of what took place in the Tartar regions of the North we know 
little, since their dynasties have not been recognised by Chinese his- 
torians as legitimate. The true Celestial annals, and indeed the lore of 
Chinese genius, belong at this time to the stimulus afforded by the 
new Southern conditions. The new Capital, near the present Nankin, 
was on the great Yangtse, now just blossoming into her heritage of 
wealth and commerce, and not far from the centre of a most picturesque 
region, splendid lakes and magnificent mountains, still almost unexplored, 
and covered with dense primeval forests. Not only did this sudden 
revelation of natural beauty impress the Chinese imagination, hereto- 
fore fed upon the more arid plains of the more ancient North ; but 
it must be remembered that it was in this very central district, hardly 
yet won to Mongol culture, that Laotse, the founder of Individualism 
and Taoism, had been born some 1,000 years before; that here the 
first great elegiac poet, Kutsugen, had poured forth his lamentations 
in rich splendour of imagery and the long swinging lines of a new 



36 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

metre. Here, too, a primitive people, of smaller stature, possibly allied 
to the Japanese, had pursued rude arts of their own from an unpierced 
antiquity, among which were the plastic forms of unglazed vases, and 
the rude effigies of animals and birds in the same rough material. 
Later in the Han dynasty this very plastic genius had found vent in 
characteristic bronzes, such as the drums and the frogs set upon their 
face. Here were veins of feeling and susceptibility fresh and unworked, 
capable of inoculating with new power the somewhat worn imagination 
of the destroyers of Han. It was the reversal of geographical relation- 
ships in Europe, where the dispersed Romans found new springs of 
effort in the vigorous forests of a German North. It must be noticed, 
too, that these Southern seats of the Chinese were in closer proximity 
to a new part of India, the South through Burmah, or along the 
opening lines of coast trade. A few adventurous Arabian merchants 
were already seeking the Southern and Eastern ports ; and a revived 
native dynasty in Persia (the Sassanian) was in some vague communi- 
cation by sea with the Chinese coast. The Byzantine Empire, on the 
other hand, the Eastern successor of the Romans, still held a caravan 
overland trade with the Northern or Tartar provinces. Still, as late as 
451, the Hunnish invasions of Europe largely blocked the lines of 
peaceful traffic. In the great simultaneous dissolving of the Roman and 
Han Empires, the unstable hordes of Tartar locusts blotted out vast 
regions of intervening space, and almost obliterated the memory of the 
earlier contact. Civilisation had to be resown at both ends, and it was 
the new Southern dynasties of China that began to reap the Eastern 
harvest. 

It was here, too, in the Southern Chinese nests, that Buddhism 
could drop her most fertile germs. The Northern route from India 
to China was precarious at best ; the superstitious tribes on the desert 
border welcomed Indian culture as a new kind of fetich rather than as 
inner enlightenment, and the Confucian scholars of Wei were, as always, 
most powerful with their Tartar masters, and even led them at times 
to kill Buddhist priests and destroy monasteries. It was in the 
romantic, the Taoist, the Individualistic South that the deeper 
Buddhism found its natural ally. Taoism was already the sworn foe 
of the Confucian Socialism, full of mystical leanings, inclined to poetry 
and art. With it the stronger tenets of a positive Buddhism that 
regarded the devotee as a kind of spiritual hero, able to conquer 



CHINESE BUDDHIST ART 37 

all regions of matter and spirit, quickly amalgamated. In short, we 
can assert that the religion of the three Southern dynasties which 
now ruled successively at Nanking the Sung, the Tsi, and the Liang 
is a working union between Taoism and Buddhism, which practically 
excluded for the time all the chilly growth of Confucian classicism. 
Here, at these Courts upon the Yangtse, or often in picturesque 
monasteries perched high on the shoulders of wild mountains, the 
imported Indian priests and their native scholars mastered the greater 
part of that stupendous translation of Sanscrit and Pali texts which is 
known as the Chinese canon. The enormously rich literary treasures 
of the Indian mind, and of Buddhist lore in its successive growths, 
lay now in the hands of the imaginative Chinese. 

One more important factor must be noticed the general adoption 
throughout China of a new form of writing material, a fine grained 
paper, instead of bamboo and clumsy bark papyrus, with flexible silk 
tissue for aesthetic effort ; the manufacture of a rich dark ink from 
lamp-black mixed with glue ; and especially an improved form of hair 
pencil, which, with firm thick base, thinned at the tip into a fine 
point, afforded great elasticity and modulated thickness to the 
touch ; and a full reservoir of pigment for prolonged writing. With 
these tools Chinese written characters became transformed from the 
several stages of cutting and smearing in clumsy symbolism into a pure 
caligraphic art where the flexibility of perfect brush stroke could unite 
with decorative proportioning. Also a new medium for art was now 
furnished, that could substitute for rudely relieved silhouettes upon 
bronze, stone, or wooden plates, freer images conceived first in terms of 
separated and highly decorative lines, which lines could then be filled 
in with tones of ink, or with colours to differentiate pictorially the 
value of masses. 

It was in the first of. the three Southern dynasties, the Sung (So), 
that all these innovations found notable beginnings. The great poet, 
Toemmei, for the first time, praises the life of rustic freedom upon 
the Yangtse, and forms one of a White Lotos Club of mountain 
climbers and thinkers organized under the leadership of a Buddhist 
priest. His contemporary, Ogishi (Wang Hsi-chih), first established 
the splendid spacing of written characters in manuscripts, and the free 
thickening and thinning of the strokes, which renders him the " Father 
of Chinese handwriting," and came later to its fruition with the perfect 



38 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

style of the Tang dynasty. The new opportunity of painting, too, 
had been seized a little earlier by So Fukko, who had utilized the 
freer brush stroke to delineate dragons floating in clouds of softer tone. 
A contemporary of Toemmei and Ogishi, Kogaishi (Ku K'ai-chih), had 
gone further in trying to make the lines executed by the brush a 
rhythmic outline for poetically conceived figures. He is thus the 
father of pure Chinese figure painting.* We know that he painted the 
first portrait of the Upasaka Yuima, the prototype of the lay Buddhist 
philosopher who was fast taking the place in this So of the Confucian 
Mandarin. All later portraits of Yuima, who is traditionally a Hindu 
metaphysician originally opposed to Sakyamuni, but converted by the 
latter's disciple Avanda, are developments from the thought of 
Kogaishi's. It may be that some original or copy sufficiently like the 
lost Kogaishi original may yet be lurking in the archives of some rustic 
Chinese noble ; but all those which in Japan lay claim to being such 
bear evidence of later inspiration. But in the Kinseki So we find 
two figures which had been cut on stone from drawings by Kogaishi, 
and which probably give a fair idea of his delineation, but not of his 
toning in ink and colour. What we are to look for in Kogaishi's 
pen force is made clear by the statement of later critics that Godoshi 
really founded his stupendous line upon the key afforded by the So 
master. 

The short-lived Sei (Ch'i) dynasty (479-502), which succeeded 
the So (Sung), only carried these movements further. The great 
landscape poet, Shareiun, following Toemmei, gives us the metrical 
praise of wild mountain forms, like a veritable Chinese Wordsworth, 
introduces the formal stanza of lines of seven characters that come 
to perfection in Tang, and originates the word for " landscape," 
which afterwards becomes classic in both China and Japan, namely 
" sansui " ; that is, mountain and wafer, assuming that in a perfect 
landscape painting or poem there must occur both the upheaval 
of form and the contrast, or softening, of it by alluvial motion. 
Here, too, Buddhist painting practically originates in an effort to 
substitute tinted drawings of altar-pieces for the statuesque originals. 
These originals were often coloured when not of bronze, and the 

* EDITOR'S NOTE. The painting by Kogaishi in the British Museum is now 
recognised as undoubtedly genuine. There is said to be another in the great 
collection of Fuan Tang, in China. 



CHINESE BUDDHIST ART 39 

new pictorial art could well represent the heavy statue on a scroll of 
silk, capable of easy transportation. The lines for such work would 
rather be hair lines representing the contours of sculpture than forceful 
delineations of the thickened brush a pictorial style which we may 
suppose to have been imported, too, with Indian drawings. In this 
way it may well be that the beginnings of strong line work with 
Kogaishiin So were partly obscured by more delicate colour decora- 
tions of Buddhist painting, until revived by Godoshi (Wu Tao-tzu) 
in the 8th century. An example of such early Buddhist painting, 
which follows the lines of statuary and delicate carving in halos, is 
shown in this book. 

But the real culmination of this romantic Southern illumination did 
not appear till the Rio (Liang) dynasty in 502, and especially the long 
reign of Butei (Wu-ti), its founder, who had been the chief general 
of the waning Sei ; and who, the namesake of the Han Emperor 
celebrated for opening intercourse with Western Asia six centuries 
before, is the first great picturesque figure on the Chinese throne since 
that famed Han (Kan) reign. Butei, denounced by the later Confucian 
analysts as a superstitious bigot, is one of those great, generous- 
minded monarchs who, full of hope and genius, fall into misfortune 
through their lack of worldly wisdom. At first he was a staunch 
advocate of Taoism, giving, indeed, to all late Chinese literature that 
flavour of enthusiasm over hermit life and the mysterious power 
attainable through mountain freedom which to-day is best preserved 
in the romanticism of the Japanese soul. But early in his reign 
the twenty-eighth Buddhist patriarch, Daruma, came to Western China 
from India, and Butei invited him to his Court, where he became 
his chief patron and student, affording him perfect seclusion in a 
cave temple among the mountains. It was this same Daruma who 
amid these picturesque scenes developed the thought and discipline 
of a new Buddhist sect, the Dhyan or Zen, which, however, did 
not bear its full fruition of influence upon literature and art until 
the Sung dynasty. Butei (Wu-ti) has never been forgiven by 
later Mandarins because, a few years later, he went the extreme 
length of dedicating himself, though still an Emperor, as full 
Buddhist priest in the temple of Dotaiji.* In 546 he went about his 
kingdom preaching Buddha in person, like an itinerant monk. In 
* Dotaiji is one of five temples built by the Emperor Butei. 



40 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

this way his dynasty weakened, and was soon succeeded by the 
short-lived Chu. 

The development of landscape poetry and of Buddhist painting 
under Liang was enormous ; but most of the latter is lost in all 
but name. It is possible that the famous landscape painting in 
oil upon leather that decorates the Chinese biwa or lute in the 
Japanese treasury at Nara, dates from this time; but the Tartar 
nature of the scenery and costume, in spite of the elephant, would 
lead us to ascribe it, if so early at all, to a Northern contemporary 
artist. Traces of Buddhist Liang painting are met with, however; 
the considerably defaced Amidaiji Mandarin of Nara-Ken probably 
belonging to this age. 

But the bulk of the knowledge which we have of the Buddhist art 
of Rio (Liang) and Chin (Ch'en), of their Northern contemporary, 
and of the following Sui dynasty (589-620), which united North 
and South, after two centuries of separation, into a provisional 
Empire, is derived from the remains of sculpture rather than of 
painting. Pictorial art still remained, to the second century of 
Tang, an inferior and derivative one. The greatest glories of far- 
Eastern sculpture were still to create ; and here we must give a 
brief account of their tentative forms. 

The statues of this whole separated period 5th and 6th 
centuries are divisible into two great forms, as they derive their 
nature from Northern Tartar or from Southern Chinese influences. 
The Northern school is more clearly related to the lingering traces 
of Han and to the early Himalayan Buddhist forms that had first 
penetrated China by the Northern route. Here the rhythmic 
curvature and the attenuated forms, partly based upon Persian and 
Baktrian art, which we studied under Han in the last chapter, 
find new opportunity to expand in the richer Buddhist iconography. 
The rhythmic lines of decoration, first shown in Mesopotamia!! ornament, 
and afterward in such Ceylonese as the " moonstones," now enter 
into the lotos and flame halos of delicate bronzes, often in low 
relief. The figures in these reliefs, sometimes to be studied from 
stone copies, are generally, to the North, much attenuated, long, 
thin, and graceful, not unlike the Greekish figures found in relief 
upon Baktrian coins. The earliest Chinese Himalayan bronzes, 
though ruder, had this tendency to slimness and height. These 




* 
~>**f5W^nv^H 

BRONZE FIGURES ON A PRIEST'S STAFF-HEAD 







Of 



CHINESE BUDDHIST ART 41 

two features, attenuation and decorative curvature, distinguish the 
finest North Chinese sculpture of the 6th century. 

But in the South we have a different movement, which perhaps is 
to be regarded as double. On the one side, more graceful 
Buddhas of a South Indian type, with concentric lines of clinging 
drapery, persist down to the Tang ; but, more important, there is 
a movement, particularly located in the Eastern provinces of the 
South called Go to utilize for purposes of Buddhist sculpture 
the indigenous plastic genius which had created the unglazed pottery, 
the bronze drums, and the clay and bronze animals, such as the frogs. 
This plastic genius of the South, long lying dormant and con- 
fined to secular decoration, now suddenly expanded in the new field 
of Buddhist creation. The bronze Buddhas of this school, like the 
Han and post-Han animals, are heavy and severe in type, square 
in their main shapes square heads, square crowns, square bodies 
to which the flying draperies closely cling the heads, hands and feet 
too large for the bodies ; the draperies opening in little shell-shaped 
folds, the features hard and sharp, with projecting angular nose not 
unlike what the heads in the Han stone silhouettes suggest. We 
can feel that this is a more primitive art than the Northern, with 
not the faintest suggestion of Greco-Baktrian grace in it, and hardly 
more than a trace of Indian suavity. It is not specifically Pacific 
either, although there remains a chance that what 1 have spoken of 
as the Southern prehistoric school of unglazed clay modelling may 
be remotely related to Pacific. The type of such Buddhas and 
Bodhistatwas, for the two are not greatly differentiated, is the gilt 
bronze statuette still at Horiuji. It comes like a being from a 
new Buddhist world. 

We have many reasons to believe that a considerable intercourse 
had grown up between the Eastern Chinese of Go and the early 
Japanese, as far back as the fifth century at least. Hence came by the 
evident sea-route the knowledge of Chinese writing and classical 
literature, and the first hints of Buddhism. The Japanese still call 
their earliest pronunciation of Chinese characters preserved by their 
syllabury " the Go sound." There must have been immigration to 
Japan from Go, for we have such traditions as that a Chinese 
Buddhist sculptor of the Go School came over to Japan about the 
year 500, and became naturalized in Yamato under the family name 

VOL. I. F 



42 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

Tori. We shall notice the work of the descendants of this man i 
the next chapter. 

A most interesting merging of these several Northern and Souther 
schools of art, and of the social tendencies to which they belonged, wa 
achieved in the year 589 by the foundation of the first solid Imperil 
dynasty since the fall of Han, 350 years before. This Sui (Zui) dynasty 
passionately devoted to Buddhism, proved to be short-lived, serving 
a mere introduction to the great Tang (To) dynasty, as the Tsin ha 
done for the Han 800 years earlier. For purposes of the history c 
culture we may take the Sui and the earliest years of Han as 
they formed a single movement. The characteristics of this move 
ment are clearly involved in a fertile union of so many rich divergin 
tendencies. 

For a moment the lordly Confucians of the North, rejoicing in th 
re-achieved national unity, joined hands with their Buddhist and Taoi: 
brothers from the South, mingling tendencies to literary and a: 
impulse which had diverged or grown up under widely differing cor 
ditions. The whole rich past of Chinese experience could be brougf 
under a single view, and creation could be attempted in a new an 
freer form that should transcend all the other forms, while incorporatin 
their material This is the central reason for that extraordinary flowin 
of the Chinese genius in the early Tang dynasty. We shall follow 
only in its very first steps, up say to about 640 A.D., and again on! 
so far as it affects Buddhist sculpture. 

It is fairly clear just how the bronze types were enriched by 
conjunction of the two main tendencies, although for a time, as in th 
early Corean work, we notice a good deal of oscillation between ti 
two poles, and some ineffective effort. In general we may point to 
reconciliation between the two main aesthetic features of North an 
South the tall slim grace and exquisite curvature of the former, an 
the heavy and solid sobriety of plastic form in the latter. The stror 
bronze modelling of the Tori type, mentioned above, now became use 
to execute more rounded, tall and human figures, of perfected contou 
Such bronze statuettes as the Buddha of Healing, Yakushi catching u 
his long robes in his left hand, probably belong to this new movemen 
So does the larger seated figure formerly belonging to M. S. Bing, < 
Paris, with the beautiful plates and the base of angels in low reli 
seated on lotos thrones and playing on musical instruments. The; 




o 

H 



H 
H 



CHINESE BUDDHIST ART 43 

latter figures have a combination of grace and sweetness in conception, 
and of a certain rude naivete in style, that reminds us of the early- 
work of Donatello. A still more perfect example is the little bronze 
Kwannon of Contemplation, owned by the Fine Arts Academy in Kioto. 
This was found by one of my Japanese colleagues and myself during 
one of our early explorations, and purchased by us as a nucleus 
for treasures which we hoped that a museum attached to the coming 
school would eventually collect. This has perfect suavity of contour 
combined with restraint, as naive as an Egyptian bronze, yet human as 
archaic Greek, using the fold system of the bronze drapery in the Go 
School as the starting-point of wonderfully rich and unsymmetrical line 
relations. But one of the finest groups of this period (from 580 to 
640 A.D.) are the hard, dark wooden statues, more than half of the 
size of life, of the so-called " 5 Kokuzo,'' now owned by the temple of 
Toji in Southern Kioto. These retain all the quality and feeling of 
bronze ; the splendid naive animals, peacock, horse, etc., on which the 
figures sit, recalling the early Southern animal sculptures in clay and 
metal. The figures here show that projection of the face line in profile 
over the line of the depressed chest, and nearly in line with the 
projecting abdomen, which belongs to most all the work of this day 
( 600 A.D.) in China, Corea, and Japan. It is possible that this 
characteristic contour implies the mystical depression of the diaphragm 
and the withholding of inspiration a feature entirely changed in later 
work. Here too the lengthening of the lobes of the ears is shown to 
be due to the insertion of heavy cylindrical ornaments enlarged at each 
end. This feature is found in other Chinese statues of this date, as 
in the Chin or Dzin Bisjamon of Seiroji, near Kioto. Here we have 
the very type of a North Chinese warrior, with oblique rolling eyes, 
but of a tall slender figure clothed in armour, utterly opposed to the 
dumpy Chinese warriors of modern art. 

That we should make a break at this point is due to the facts first, 
that Corean and Japanese art have already started under influences 
derived from North, South, and the Sui union ; so that we should study 
these important branches in connection with the parent stem ; and the 
fact that Chinese art itself is about to take on several new features 
with the rising Tang, notably the modifications of the Greco-Buddhist 
School. Before we come to consider that powerful solvent, we must 
make a full inventory of those naive but charming forms of Far- 

F 2 



44 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

Eastern Buddhist art that centre about the illumination of Sui. In 
Japan especially we shall find records of this art far richer and more 
splendid than any which have yet been discovered by us in China. But 
the Japanese branch grew partly from Corean transplanting, so that we 
must first consider briefly the art of the Peninsuk. 



U6RARY 

OF THE 

UNIVERSE Of ILLINOIS, 



CHAPTER IV. 

EARLY COREAN AND JAPANESE BUDDHIST ART. 
CHINESE INFLUENCE. BRONZE SCULPTURE. 

6th and fth Centuries A.D. 

CHINA is, in fact, what she names herself, " The Middle King- 
dom." She is like a great central tower encircled with powerful 
buttresses of races, partly akin to her in blood, partly tributary, 
but all feeling the weight of her great ideals. Her neighbours on the 
west and south Thibetans, Burmese, Malays of Siam and Annam we 
do not specially consider in this monograph, what is strongest in their 
early art being more related to Indian than Mongolian. But on the 
north and north-east China is fringed with a line of states and peoples, 
often hostile, sometimes servile, but of a blood and thought closely 
akin to her own. These, too, have all been submerged by very similar 
waves of Northern Buddhism ; and they have imported from the 
common centre Taoist and Confucian principles in varying proportions. 
The Hunnish, Scythian and Mongolian hordes to the north have 
seldom entered sufficiently into the pale of civilization to produce even 
a branch art, except when, for short periods, they have put themselves 
in possession of the Imperial throne. They have little in common 
with what we have called the Pacific affiliations of the primitive 
Chinese. But for the tribes on the Amoor river to a less extent the 
Manchus for the Coreans, and especially for the Japanese, what is 
primitive and what is fine in Chinese life and art have had a vital 
meaning, so that we may regard their several, and often robust, 
civilizations as almost integral parts of the central movement. The 
most original and the most independent of all these surrounding states 
has been, of course, the Japanese. The civilization of this complex 
island race has often proved itself, and is proving itself again to-day, 
to be for incisive idea and flexibility of spirit less a subordinate or 



46 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

tributary than an independent leader in the whole group. No doubt 
it can be made the object of a separate study ; and yet, especially for 
the purposes of Art, there is sound value in regarding its work as a 
variation, though a very unruly one, upon the Chinese norm. 

Closer to China than is Japan, closer in spirit if not in race, because 
closer in communication, lies the peninsula of Corea, originally a wealthy, 
prosperous, and progressive country, though now so feeble. Corea 
has only in part, and then for very short periods, been included 
within the limits of the Chinese empire. At other periods she has 
been dominated, and now seems finally to be dominated, by the Japanese. 
But in the early days of her civilization, from the 4th to the 7th 
centuries of our era, she betrayed so much of independent vigour 
and genius as to make her art, though only for a short illumination, 
a special and important centre of creation. This happened, too, at a 
time when Japan, still in the grasp of semi-barbarism, was prepared to 
take her first great step out into the light. That the neighbouring 
states of Corea, only a few days' sail across the narrow straits, should 
have become the special tutor of Japan at the time of Japan's most 
critical youth, is a circumstance so fortunate as to make at least a brief 
study of her early Art a part of the study of Chinese and Japanese. 
Corea, in some real sense, was a link between the two ; and for a 
moment, about the year 600, her Art flared up into a splendour which 
fairly surpassed the achievements of her two chief rivals. 

A still juster view of the relationship is found, if we consider the 
juxtaposition of three important land projections into the China Sea : 
the peninsula of Corea pointing south-east, the Southern islands of 
Japan sweeping to the south-west, and the Chinese province of 
Go projecting to the north of east. Between these three early sea 
communication had been easy, and both Corea and Japan had been 
influenced by the Art of Go while they were still in their barbarous 
beginnings. 

Some European writers have appeared to hold that Corean Art in 
the 6th century must have been influenced quite specially by the Art 
of Persia. This seems to be due to their assumption that Persian 
Art in the 6th century was like what it became after contact with 
Mongolic races in the I3th century and onward. The Persian Art 
of this day was Sassanian, which can be described as a mixture of 
debased Assyrian with debased Roman. We have already seen that 




THE FAMOUS COREAN TAMAMUSHI SHRINE, 
at Horiuji. 



Of THE 
UNIVERSITY OF 



EARLY COREAN AND JAPANESE BUDDHIST ART 47 

the early Tang dynasty of China was in some sort of communication 
with the Sassanian coast. Whatever small Persian influence entered 
Corea and Japan at this time was Sassanian, and in both cases probably 
derived from intercourse with Go, where commercial relations with the 
ports of the Indian Ocean were already centering. The likeness of 
Corean, Chinese and Japanese Art of the yth century, however, to the 
Persian of a later day, such as it is, is much more likely due to a 
counter-wave of influence, which carried Eastern motive into West 
Asia. This movement, however, and in fact the many refluxes of 
influence between China, India and Persia, lie beyond our scope. 

The early Buddhist Art of Corea, of which we hardly get satisfactory 
glimpses before the 6th century, is derived from a convergence of the 
same two streams which, as we have seen, were to enrich the central- 
ized Art of the Dzin dynasty in China; that is, motives from both North 
and South; By overland route Corea remained in close touch with the 
Tartar north, with its Corean trade with the Mongols and Manchus 
and Amoor peoples, and thus with a more primitive slender Buddhist 
type that ran somewhat to effeminacy of curve decoration. By mari- 
time route, on the other hand, Corea had come under the influence of 
the southern Yangtse provinces, with their severe sculpturesque style 
and their skill for modelling in bronze. In a special sense, therefore, 
Corea had already forestalled the Dzin dynasty in its ability to unite 
the two streams of south and north, and therefore rose upon a sudden 
wave of artistic power which in China itself was slower in gathering. 
Corean Art, however, is not just like Dzin ; partly because of a new 
racial genius, partly because the elements were to be combined in 
different proportions. In the finest Corean work the Go element 
probably played a more decisive part, because while to China Go was 
only a part of the south, to Corea it was the south itself. We find, 
then, in Corean 6th century Art a wider range of forms between the 
two extremes of excessive attenuation and short dumpy figures with 
large heads. 

The Corean race was probably in prehistoric times, like its neighbours, 
strongly affiliated in custom with the Northern Pacific races ; but records 
of this early day are mostly lost. As in Japan, the relics dug from 
primitive graves reveal forms related to the Han dynasty of China, 
under which Pacific motive is already submerged. But during the days 
of Han itself, Corea and Japan, quite independent of the Chinese 



48 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

monarch, had come into close relations through an invasion of Japan. 
If we could see the rude art of both peoples at this time we should 
probably find it Pacific. Corea paid tribute to Japan for many years. 
Still neither of those peoples could have been regarded as highly 
civilized. The beginnings of Corean culture, which preceded Japanese, 
themselves followed the dispersion of Chinese peoples due to the long 
disturbance of the civil wars of the 3rd century. Feudal, as distinguished 
from dynastic Han, held out until 263. Go, one of the most import- 
ant of the three fighting states, submitted to Western Shin, thus ending 
the war in 280. Doubtless whole groups of colonizers from Han and 
Go had sought shelter in the neutral peninsula, thus bringing the 
industries of civilization. The study of Chinese writing and of one or 
two Confucian classics came even as far as Japan, but from Corea, in 
285. Through the 4th century these disturbances persisted, and little 
new culture could have been gained. But with the division between 
north and south in the 3rd, the new Buddhist Art, sweeping over 
China in two separate waves, could reunite in Corean creative efforts. 
It is from this date that we consider a high Corean Buddhist culture 
to begin that finally displaces the relics of Han Art. But perhaps 
nothing that we have to show ot Corean Art dates from before the 
6th century. It is almost entirely derived from early importations into 
Japan. No attempt will here be made to distinguish between the arts 
of the three states into which Corea was early divided, but we shall 
merely say that the state called Hiakusai, the nearest both to Japan and 
to Go, produced most of the pieces which have been preserved to Japan. 
One of the earliest Corean Buddhist types which we possess is the 
very attenuated bronze seated Kwannon of contemplation, a small statuette. 
Its extreme thinness is almost grotesque, and its sharp features are a 
mixture of Han and Himalayan. On the other hand, the draperies 
show influence of the Go method. A much larger figure of the same 
subject is worked up in wood and leather, the latter substance being 
used for the connecting bands of drapery. By far the tallest of the 
Corean figures is the standing Kwannon with a vase, still on the great 
altar of the Kondo of Horiuji. The head is small and well formed, 
but the body of excessive length, some fifteen heads perhaps. The close 
fitting of the long downward drapery lines, with almost no relief, is 
essentially Corean, but that phase of it which may be Sassanian is 
native. A stiff formal curvature is given to the openings of folds, 




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OF THE 
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS, 



EARLY COREAN AND JAPANESE BUDDHIST ART 49 

the ends of mantles curving up like flower petals. For primitive 
painting and early writing in the Go style we have the illuminated 
Scripture roll, where little dumpy Buddhas are surrounded by equally 
crude disciples, all in harsh primitive colours. The vague suggestions 
of rock and tree are in a free scratchy style that recalls the early 
Chinese landscape in oil previously mentioned. 

That this is the very nature of Corean landscape is also shown 
by the paintings, also probably in thin oil, upon the so-called Tamamushi 
Shrine. But elaborate Corean secular painting is best exemplified in 
the portrait of the Japanese Prince Shotoku, made at the beginning 
of the yth century by his guest, the Corean Prince Asa. 

Two great monuments of sixth-century Corean art still remain. The 
Tamamushi Shrine, already mentioned, is a miniature two-story temple 
made of wood, to be used as a kind of reliquary, which was presented 
to the Japanese Empress about 590 A.D., and which still stands in 
perfect preservation upon the great altar at Horiuji, near Nara. The 
roof is finished in metal in the form of tiling. The lower story is 
hardly more than a great box, with paintings upon its four sides. 
But the upper story opens with miniature temple doors, which, as well 
as the solid parts of the walls, are elaborately painted on the exterior. 
The paintings below are much defaced, but the landscape portions show 
mountain forms that are probably akin to the Han clay reliefs of the 
Kunlung range. Long, lanky Buddhist angels fly through the air, amid 
bamboo trees. The finest paintings, and best preserved, are the two 
tall, thin Buddhist deities upon the doors, which show a relationship 
to the thin art of the Northern Wei. Here is a hint of the flying draperies, 
which sculpture for the most part eschewed. But the most striking 
feature about this shrine is the elaborate finish of all the corners and 
pillars and transverse beams with an overlay of plates of perforated 
bronze, which were probably gilded, the patterns of the perforation 
being among the finest specimens of the Corean power over abstract 
curvature. These repeating patterns are full of unique pictorial tangles 
of long, cool curves of restraint, knotting themselves at unexpected 
foci. This fine Corean curvature we must explain as an outcome of the 
Babylonian of Han, re-inforced by the Persio-Indian of Buddhist originals, 
like the "moonstones," made delicate by Tartar Art in the divided 
centuries, and strong again by the specially decorative genius of the 
Coreans. 



50 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

How early the Coreans began their plastic work in glazed pottery, 
for which they later became so famous, is still a disputed question. 
No examples of it are found in the Japanese treasury of the 8th 
century. Corean temple architecture is exemplified by the oldest buildings 
of Horiuji in Japan, which we shall soon describe ; and the decorative 
arts are still further shown in the hangings and carvings upon the 
Kondo of Horiuji. Some of the priests' vestments, showing Sassanian 
designs of rosettes essentially Babylonian, and Persian groups of hunting 
kings and lions were probably brought from Hiakusai at this time. 

But the greatest perfect monument of Corean Art that has come 
down to us, without which we could only conjecture as to the height 
reached by the peninsula creations, is the great standing Buddha, or 
possibly Bodhisattwa, of the Yumedono pavilion at Horiuji. This 
most beautiful statue, a little larger than life, was discovered by me 
and a Japanese colleague in the summer of 1884. I had credentials 
from the central government which enabled me to requisition the opening 
ofgodownsand shrines. The central space of the octagonal Yumedono 
was occupied by a great closed shrine, which ascended like a pillar towards 
the apex. The priests of Horiuji confessed that tradition ascribed the 
contents of the shrine to Corean work of the days of Suiko, but that 
it had not been opened for more than two hundred years. On fire 
with the prospect of such a unique treasure, we urged the priests to 
open it by every argument at our command. They resisted long, 
alleging that in punishment for the sacrilege an earthquake might well 
destroy the temple. Finally we prevailed, and I shall never forget our 
feelings as the long disused key rattled in the rusty lock. Within the 
shrine appeared a tall mass closely wrapped about in swathing bands 
of cotton cloth, upon which the dust of ages had gathered. It was no 
light task to unwrap the contents, some 500 yards of cloth having been 
used, and our eyes and nostrils were in danger of being choked with the 
pungent dust. But at last the final folds of the covering fell away, 
and this marvellous statue, unique in the world, came forth to human 
sight for the first time in centuries. It was a little taller than life, but 
hollow at the back, carved most carefully from some hard wood which 
had been covered with gilding, now stained to the yellow-brown of bronze. 
The head was ornamented with a wonderful crown of Corean openwork 
gilt bronze, from which hung long streamers of the same material set 
with jewels. 





Z J 

z -3 




Z rt > 



OF THE 
UNIVERSITY OF it 



EARLY COREAN AND JAPANESE BUDDHIST ART 51 

But it was the sesthetic wonders of this work that attracted us most. 
From the front the figure is not quite so noble, but seen in profile 
it seemed to rise to the height of archaic Greek art. The long lines 
of drapery, sweeping at the two sides from shoulders to feet, were 
unbroken in single quiet curves approximating straight lines, giving 
great height and dignity to the figure. The chest was depressed, the 
abdomen slightly protruding, the action of the hands, holding between 
them a jewel or casket of medicine, rendered with vigorous modelling. 
But the finest feature was the profile view of the head, with its sharp 
Han nose, its straight clear forehead, and its rather large almost negroid 
lips, on which a quiet mysterious smile played, not unlike Da Vinci's 
Mona Lisa's. Recalling the archaic stiffness of Egyptian Art at its 
finest, it appeared still finer in the sharpness and individuality of the 
cutting. In slimness it was like a Gothic statue from Amiens, but far 
more peaceful and unified in its single system of lines. Its arrangement 
of draperies seemed to be based upon the bronze statuette type of Go, 
but suddenly expanded to unexpected beauty by the addition of such 
slender proportions. We saw at once that it was the supreme masterpiece 
of Corean creation, and must have proved a most powerful model to 
the artists of Suiko, especially to Shotoku ; but all that we have to 
speak of later. 

The one additional feature which here merits the highest praise is 
the wonderful flower-like tangle of the curved lines in the open-work 
crown which twine about the focus of a crescent moon. Whatever the 
promise of decorative beauty in low relief or perforated plates already 
approached by Han mirrors, or Wei groups, or the Corean scroll work 
upon Tamamushi, all were far surpassed by the richness and aesthetic 
unity of this splendid crown. It must ever remain a chief monument 
of the temporary supremacy of Corean Art at the end of the sixth 
century. 

This must end our special account of Corean Art, which we intro- 
duce here only because it forms the fitting and necessary preface to 
the study of early Japanese Buddhistic art. If the Go influence came 
directly into Japan with the Tori family and others, it recoiled again 
in a second more fluent wave and mingled with other fertile germs 
from the shores of Corea. So many were the types that came pouring 
into Japan from all parts of Asia, India, North China, Go and Corea, 
that at first the Japanese sculptors were almost bewildered. The 



52 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

variety of choice, however, brought with it freedom ; and certainly 
among all the most delicate and aesthetic models were those which little 

Corea furnished. 

******** 

In entering upon the study of the total Art of Japan we have a 
subject which might well be detached for a separate monograph. And 
yet we deliberately renounce the privilege of that more obvious unity 
for the difficult task of describing the larger unity into which the 
creations of all East Asian peoples were really swept. It may seem 
presumptuous for one who is neither a scholar nor a sociologist to 
group cultures which no scholar yet understands in their separation ; 
and yet just because art work furnishes such a large amount of 
evidence, impressive even where it lacks explanatory record, it is most 
important to weigh the unique testim.pny of these aesthetic documents. 

Japan ! What romantic thoughts and memories arise at the name ! 
Set uniquely along the coming paths of traffic between East and West, 
endowed by temperament to become the interpreter of East to West 
and of West to East, we have here an illuminated corner of history's 
scroll, a flash of human genius at highest tension, which in our 
records only the sensitively organized Greek, and that for only a few 
centuries, ever reached. The land itself a fitting casket for the soul 
is as broken into islands, peaks and promontories as the Greek Archi- 
pelago, but swathed with a far richer garment of semi-tropical foliage. 
The charm of the South Sea Islands is all here without their excessive 
enervation ; for along her second unique line of geographical setting, 
Japan, washed on opposite sides by currents from the Equator and the 
Pole, declares also kinship to that bright North with its mysterious 
races who still seem to retain the keys of Pacific Art. 

It would be folly here to attempt even a succinct view of Japanese 
history or culture, or to enter into those deep studies of Shinto motive 
and family cult which Lafcadio Hearn has illuminated. I shall have to 
assume that the reader already knows much of this, and confine myself 
to those additional bits of information which throw direct light upon 
the path of Art. 

Japanese civilized Art probably begins at the end of the 6th century 
with the almost simultaneous introduction of Buddhism from Go, from 
Dzin, and from Hiakusai. And yet there is never a beginning to a 
national art ; pursue it as far back as we may to some primitive guiding 




PORTRAIT OF SHOTOKU-TAISHI 
AND HIS TWO CHILDREN. 
By the Corean Prince Asa. 



IIBRAHV 
OF THE 
UNIVERSITY Of 



EARLY COREAN AND JAPANESE BUDDHIST ART 53 

impulse, beyond that we still find traces of indigenous power. The long 
interval between the 3rd and the 6th century was for Japan a period of 
slow acquisition, of semi-civilization, of the dim dawning of industry and 
letters a period whose almost prehistoric art is known to us only by 
the recent exploration of rude stone-cut tombs. But still beyond that 
stretches a far vaguer world of unknown derivation, which has left 
almost savage traces in the primitive shell-heaps, and which must have 
had close affiliation with the Ainos of the north and the Miaotse of 
Go on the south. 

The Japanese people, though of extraordinarily complex origin, have 
been welded by time into an almost homogeneous race. And yet we 
can trace in their art signs of successive immigrations, much as Dr. 
Schliemann traces the nine superimposed ages of Ilium. At the bottom, 
or near it, lie the broken shards of unglazed pottery from the primitive 
shell-heaps. Above this, perhaps, and connecting it with the Han 
period, are various relics of the Pacific Age, conventional designs upon 
bronze ornaments, comma-shaped jewels of hard stone which were once 
strung into necklaces like bear's claws, and the first hint of masks 
which, even among their later Shinto derivations, show close analogies 
with both the south New Guinea and the Philippines, and the north- 
east Alaska and Mexico. In some cases this analogy amounts to 
identity. 

But perhaps the most satisfactory evidence of this early art is found 
in a comparison of the architecture of the primitive Ise shrines with 
Filippino huts on the one hand and the Aino villages of Yezo on the 
other. In a view of the one-storied Aino thatched houses with their 
narrow streets we probably have a correct glimpse of a Japanese " city " 
of, say, about the time of Christ, among which the dwelling of the chief 
or " emperor " was a mere enlargement of the type upon a raised plat- 
form much in the Ise style. Aino or Kumaso or Yebisu settlements 
remained common all over Japan until the jth century, and lingered in 
Northern Hondo even down to the I2th. Many Japanese geographical 
names are derived from this primitive source. It is said to have been 
in the 2nd year B.C. that an imperial decree abolished the immolation 
of living human beings at Court funerals, clay figures being substituted. 
And it was not till 468 A.D. that even the emperor's "palace" enjoyed 
the addition of a second story. 

The first great semi-civilised age, the dawn of civilisation as opposed 



54 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

to this primitive barbarism, extends from the 3rd century to the 6th, 
and is conterminous with the slow dispersion of Han Art and blood 
eastward into Corea and over the Yellow Sea. Yet even this pre- 
Buddhistic Japan retains Pacific forms in its ornament, mixed with some 
Han-like patterns derived from Corea and Go. The building of military 
and industrial roads began in 250 ; weavers were sent as tribute from 
Corea in 283 ; a finer breed of horse was received the following year ; 
a Corean Professor of Chinese classics introduced the written characters 
in 285 ; Chinese came from Han in 289; Corean physicians came in 
414; mulberries were planted in 457; an imperial commission to Go 
returned in 462 ; Go sends special Chinese weavers in 470 ; carpenters 
and masons are ordered from Corea in 493 ; a special embassy from 
the Buddhist Emperor Butei of Liang arrives in 522 ; but the decisive 
step that marks the limit of this acquisitive age was taken when a 
Corean prince sent over to the Japanese Emperor Kimmei in 552 a 
partial set of Buddhist scripture and images presumably bronze. 

The chief source of our knowledge of the art of this transition 
period is the grave tumuli of Yamato and elsewhere, from which modern 
archaeology has unearthed the objects buried with kings, heroes and 
statesmen. These tombs are narrow chambers lined with large faced 
stone blocks, over which a large mound of earth was heaped. In the 
centre of the chamber stands a massive stone coffin, with an enormously 
heavy board cover in a single piece. From within such capacious 
receptacles have been disinterred the human bones, armour, swords, 
jewels, vessels, mirrors and clay figures of men and horses belonging 
to this interesting day. The unglazed clay work is essentially like 
Southern Chinese, with its oven-pots surmounted with communal 
service, and with horses and other animals not unlike in shape the 
Han pottery derived from Southern sources. This pottery is only a 
refinement upon the savage fragments found in the primitive shell 
heaps, only that was more blue in tone, whereas this tends toward cream- 
yellow. The human figures are rude, mostly like those of wood and 
stone found throughout Pacific lands, hardly inferior to the best of 
Mexico and Peru, and at their best rising to a vigour of action, as 
in the clay bowmen, which foreshadows the civilized Buddhist art of 
the seventh and eight centuries. 

The metal work is bronze and iron, showing a mixture of at least 
two influences ; one akin to the work of North-Eastern Asiatic tribes 



EARLY COREAN AND JAPANESE BUDDHIST ART 55 

and essentially Pacific in ornament, the other essentially Han. The 
Corean derived element is probably itself already a mixture of these 
two. The sword blades are straight for thrusting, and quite unlike the 
later curved sword of Japan. Armour is made of a few thin plates of 
steel sewn or riveted together. Casques are simple pointed domes 
tightly fitting. Bronze mirrors are clearly Han in type, the simple star 
and circle ornament relieved on the back, sometimes accompanied by 
rusty Han inscriptions also in relief. An immense amount of bead 
work is found, mostly in carved shell and stone, among which the 
comma-shaped magatama, often of a clear green stone, plays a powerful 
part. In short, it is all the arts of a crude people rising upon the 
circumference of civilization through importations from the centre, and 
not yet sufficient master of itself or of technique to invent indigenous 
forms. 



Upon this simple island people, with its patriarchal organization, 
its village groups, its crude domestic industries, and its primitive Shinto 
Shamanism, descended rapidly towards the end of the sixth century the 
full splendour and force of continental civilization, with its imperial 
institutes, its rich city life, its imaginative literature, and especially with 
its deeper moral questioning, religious theories, and vast views of 
spiritual hierarchy in the world of Buddhist gods. Buddhism crept 
in slowly, and with some preliminary storms, between the middle and 
the end of the century, the noble Soga family becoming its strongest 
patron. But in 593, on the sudden death of the Emperor Sujun, his 
widow ascended the throne as the Empress Suiko, who thereafter 
enjoyed an uninterrupted reign of 36 years, dying at the ripe age of 
75, a reign so fraught with wonderful changes that we must speak of 
this first illumination of Japanese culture as we do of the reigns of 
Elizabeth and Victoria, and call it the age of Suiko. Now the husband 
of Suiko had, as a younger man, taken part, as had also his son, 
Shotoku, in the first Buddhist nobles' war that had been declared against 
the new religion on purist Shinto grounds by the rebel Moriya. On 
coming to the throne, after substantial victory, Sujun had registered 
his intention to take the new religion out of private aristocratic 
patronage, and make it the imperial faith, in short a State religion, as 
it was already in Corea. This vow of her dead husband the great 



56 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

Empress Suiko made it her long life work to carry into effect, more 
than seconded as she was by the Prince Imperial, a man of such extra- 
ordinary mind that he takes his place among the great creative sages 
of Eastern Asia. He has sometimes been called the " Constantine or 
Buddhism" for Japan. And, though he never ascended the throne, 
dying some years before his mother, this Prince Shotoku was evidently 
the core of all reforms. His friend, the King of Hiakusai, delighted 
at the new move in Japan, sent over his son, Prince Asa, in 597, who 
then painted the famous portrait of Shotoku already alluded to ; and we 
may presume that it was at this time that the Tamamushi Shrine, which 
we have elaborately described, was presented to the Empress Suiko. 
In 603 and 604, Shotoku himself composed and promulgated a new 
constitution, which divided the government into graded offices with 
appropriate rules and costumes. Not content with this, the Empress 
sent, in 606, a student of the noble class to study constitutional and 
court law in Dzin, the newly reunited Chinese Empire. Besides his 
report, the Coreans were zealous in sending Dzin books to Yamato. 
A history of Japan had been ordered in 620 ; but Shotoku died in the 
following year. 

But the greatest work of Suiko and Shotoku was undoubtedly the 
founding of Buddhism and of Buddhist Art upon solid and splendid 
foundations. The first school of Japanese Art proper is the Suiko 
school. In the second year of the Empress's reign, 594, an imperial 
decree ordered the building of Buddhist temples, and especially en- 
trusting the work to the young prince. Shotoku now bent all his 
energies to import from Corea, scholars, priests, architects, wood 
carvers, bronze founders, clay modellers, masons, gilders, tile makers 
and weavers ; in short, all skilled artisans whose work was involved 
in creating and installing a great Buddhist temple such as were already 
known in the peninsula kingdom. Not content with this, and realizing 
how utterly the success of such complicated and novel work would 
depend upon his personal inspection, he deliberately studied crafts- 
manship in these several arts, placed himself under the most learned 
and devout of the Corean Buddhist scholars, and in due time allowed 
himself to take holy orders under the name Shotoku, somewhat 
like but with more serious purpose than the Chinese Emperor Butei 
of Liang a century before. Full of modesty, zeal, and piety, Shotoku 
gave lectures, interpreting the new religion, not only to his relatives 



EARLY COREAN AND JAPANESE BUDDHIST ART 57 

in the Court, but to the people, who, dazed with the splendour and 
soul-stimulus of the new culture, thronged earnestly to hear him in 
the temples. 

But Shotoku never lost sight of his central purpose to erect a 
great dominating monastery in grounds not far removed from the 
imperial residence. The capital of Japan, which had been removed 
by successive monarchs from point to point of Yamato provinces ever 
since the days of its conqueror, Jimmu Tenno, was now located on 
the site of the present town of Tatsuta, a little station on the Nara- 
Ozaka railway, where the picturesque winding Tatsuta river, famous 
in even the earliest Japanese poetry for its fringe of maples emerging 
from the slopes of Mount Kaminabi, debouches upon the gravelly 
northern slopes of the great Yamato plain. Here, upon the last 
curvetting of the foothills, between whose grim and scarred domes 
ran up little bays of level green that might support the monastery 
with abundant harvest, Shotoku decided .to erect his master temple. 
A labour of disappointing years it was to accumulate rare craftsmen and 
expensive materials, mostly by importation ; but Shotoku in person 
superintended the levelling of terraces, the cutting and hauling of the 
great cedar log pillars from the mountain slopes, the kilns and the 
forges and the thousand temporary workshops, saw rise slowly into the 
air architectural piles of storied pavilion and pagoda that dwarfed to 
toadstools the wildest architectural fancies of any West Pacific 
islanders ; until at last the dream of his father Sujun stood completed 
before him, the great monastery temple Horiuji, built in arcades with 
tower gates about an enormous sanded court, and centred with blue- 
tiled palaces that rose up the mountain slopes terrace behind terrace. 
Here now was the enormous structure dedicated in presence of prelates 
and ambassadors from Hiakusai and Dzin, and here the regular work 
of a great cathedral church was inaugurated in 616. Many branch 
temples, dependent upon it, were built during the next twenty years in 
neighbouring parts of the province, especially on sites where later was 
to stand the metropolitan city of Nara. 

The early history of Horiuji is obscure, and it is possible to infer 
that a disastrous fire destroyed a large part, but not all, of the original 
structures, in 680. But there is fair reason to believe that three 
of the buildings at present existing date from before the fire, and 
back to the age of Suiko namely, the front gate guarded by the 

VOL. i. G 



58 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

" Two Kings," the great pagoda in the fore-court, and the massive 
Golden Hall (Kondo) containing the central altar. Otherwise we must 
suppose that the Suiko hangings above this altar were faithfully copied 
after the fire in a style that had already grown archaic an improbable 
supposition. Though the pagoda is somewhat heavy and flaring in 
proportions, in the Kondo we have one of the noblest examples of 
Japanese or of early Chinese architecture. Though the material be 
but wood, we must remember that in this earthquake country good 
wood is the most permanent material, proved, as in this case, to out- 
last many a stone erection of mediasval Europe. Already fine pro- 
portion is in it, and a wonderful and unusual relation between base 
and pitch of roof. If the front gate contains, as Mr. Cram seems to 
think, evidence of Greco-Buddhist structure, that would be a reason 
for dating it from after the conflagration, for there is no evidence of 
any specific Greek influence in the art of the Suiko age. 

In this temple of Horiuji were placed many of the great treasures 
of Corean art that had already, as models, found their way into 
Japan. Here, to-day, on the great altar of the Kondo, a solid block 
of masonry, some 80 feet in length by 30 feet in width, and raised five 
feet above the floor, stands the Tamamushi shrine, and several other 
shrines of inferior workmanship, the excessively tall wooden Kwannon 
already described, and other smaller pieces. When the Yumedono 
Kwannon was removed to its present position we do not know, but it 
would probably have stood originally on some part of the great 
altar in the Kondo. The present contents of the many buildings of 
Horiuji are made up of a motley aggregation of paintings, statues, 
and sacred utensils, designed or collected at many different ages, and 
of workmanship ranging from Indian and Persian through Chinese 
and Corean to Japanese, sacred treasures which have been brought 
to this central monastery as from age to age their original possessions 
crumbled away or were burned through carelessness or in wars. This 
process has made of Horiuji a natural and national museum, especially 
of those forms of art which belonged to the worship of its antique 
Sanson sect, a form of Buddhism which has now no other representa- 
tive than Horiuji in the Japanese islands. As Sanson temple after 
Sanson temple decayed, the mother, Horiuji, became the national 
custodian of their treasures. 

But of this enormous mass of material I intend to speak now, at 



EARLY COREAN AND JAPANESE BUDDHIST ART 59 

first, only of those portions which belong specifically to the Suiko age, 
leaving the others to subsequent chapters. As one stands upon 
the altar of Kondo, he gets to-day a strange, weird feeling of 
Greekish frescoes, Norman hangings, Gothic statues, and Egyptian 
bronzes, so varied is the jumble of forms of a hundred sizes. The 
store-house, too, might be ransacked for pieces that would over-fill the 
altar ; and it must be remembered that of the hundred or more 
ancient bronze statuettes which formerly were treasured here, the 
larger number, though not the largest pieces, were taken at the 
restoration for the Imperial archives. 

Picking out now the Suiko specimens in something like their 
historic order, we ought first to refer back to their ancestor in that 
stiff, square, gilt-bronze statuette which we have already taken as the 
Go type of the fifth century. This was still kept at Horiuji, in the 
godown, at the end of the ipth century. It will be remembered 
that a Chinese sculptor of Go, possibly the author of this very piece, 
had been naturalised, with other emigrants, as a Japanese citizen in 
the early part of the sixth century, taking the Japanese family name, 
Tori. That he could have practised the art of Buddhist sculpture in 
Japan in those early years we have no evidence. But we do have 
reason to believe that his son, who must have kept up through the 
interval the knowledge and exercise of his plastic art, found oppor- 
tunity, when Buddhism was coming into his father's adopted country 
at the end of the century, to return to the original home of inspira- 
tion, and give us perhaps the first bronze statuette that we can 
identify as made in Japan. This bears an inscription which, ascribing 
it to the second Tori, seems to date it as of the year 589, in the 
reign of Sujun. It is thin, being forced up out of a single sheet of 
metal, but of a sombre dignity and primitive proportion which recalls 
the solidity of Go. But to this has clearly been superadded some- 
thing of the Corean delicacy of curvature, a greater slimness of figure, 
a finer symmetrical sweep of the mantles at the side. It is most 
interesting to compare this with, on the one hand, the Go gilt 
Kwannon, and on the other with the far larger figure of the 
Yumedono. It clearly partakes of the nature of both, and establishes 
a sort of canon for the Suiko style. 

Of those of the many existing statuettes which are probably not of 
Indian, Chinese, or Corean workmanship, there are several others which 

G 2 



60 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

exhibit the unity of this early Suiko type ; but the group which finally 
establishes it as a school, and which is the most elaborate exemplification 
of it, is the bronze altar-piece which was modelled and cast, under 
Shotoku's supervision, by the third generation of the Tori family, the 
grandson of the original immigrant, as the holy of holies for the Kondo 
of Horiuji. There it still stands, enthroned, near the centre of the 
south side of the great railed altar. It is an elaborate group, richer 
than any Chinese or Corean piece which to my knowledge we now 
possess ; being a complete trinity of statues, thin but detached, com- 
posed against a magnificent bronze halo-screen. The central figure 
sits in attitude of a Buddha ; the side figures, Bodhisattwas, stand upon 
lotos seed-pods. These side figures have separate flame halos detached 
from the general screen-halo, which contains as its central feature the 
circular halo of the Buddha's head. The side figures have the large 
square head and stiff proportions of the Go statuette, but with a sweep 
of draperies which relates them clearly to the Yumedono Corean. The 
open-work crown of the latter has here become a solid curved plate, 
whose height gives the already large head too much prominence. This 
Buddha must be taken, in lack of any other such perfect specimen, 
to be the type of Suiko bronze Buddhas, and probably not far from 
the type of fifth-century Go Buddhas. The head, though uncrowned, 
is far too heavy and square, the features seeming not merely Indian, 
but almost negro. The hands, too, are large and clumsy. But in 
the disposition of the drapery, in spite of its primitiveness, we have 
a pyramidal line system that approaches grandeur. The simple shawl- 
like outer garment, open at the breast, folds on the arms, and then flowing 
down over the crossed knees, enshrouds the throne below in a broad 
rich set of curving folds that reveals a decorative beauty close to antique 
Greek. It is a tremendous tribute to the genius of the sculptor, Tori 
Busshi, that, overlooking the awkwardness of the human forms, we are 
absorbed in the architectural splendours of the group. Not only do 
the three figures build up into a finely flanked pyramid, but their unity 
and beauty are enormously enhanced by the spacing and the lines of 
the bronze screen. This is a large flat plate of bronze elaborately 
ornamented in low relief. It rises in the form of two concentric arches 
the inner of which contains within lotos tracery the main halo that 
centres behind the Buddha's forehead. The outer arch holds heavy 
clouded forms writhing upward like smoke and flame, among which 








KONDO ALTAR TRINITY. 

By Tori Busshi, at Horiuji. 



Of 



EARLY COREAN AND JAPANESE BUDDHIST ART 61 

sit in higher relief a group of small Buddhas. Between all, even the 
minutest parts of this astonishing work, we find the most subtle curve 
rhythm, that carries out into original creation germs of line feeling already 
involved in Corean Art. Yet, far removed from the over-warm sphere 
of Indian sensuousness, and without possible contact with West Asian 
forms, it takes on much of the severity and dignity of archaic Greek 
work. It strikes a happy compound of the three kindred geniuses 
of Go, Corea, and Japan ; and as the initial creative work of the new 
land, it augurs wonderful wealth for the coming art. And indeed in 
the element of architectural beauty in sculpture it has only once been 
surpassed in the second Trinity with a screen described at the end of 
this chapter. 

Nothing like a complete enumeration of the Suiko pieces known to 
us can be attempted. Another bronze Buddha in fragmentary condition 
stands upon the same altar. But a second interesting group of studies 
is found in the wooden figures which chiefly belong to two temples, 
Horiuji, and the Rokkakudo of Udzumasa near Kioto. Closely akin 
to the Bodhisattwa of the bronze Trinity is the separate wooden 
Kwannon, holding a vase in her left hand. Here we find the flame 
halo, the large head with heavy features, and the lotos throne of 
petals that bend downward all characteristic of Suiko Corean work, 
but there is an attempt to model naturally the exposed upper portion 
of the body. In the two gilded Bodhisattwa that stand on the Kondo 
altar, we have a still greater pensive sweetness, the heads are rounded, 
and bound with a wreath that really feels half Greek. Of an entirely 
different type, being almost Aztec in feeling, we have the small and 
earliest Kwannon of eleven heads, cut out of a hard dark mahogany- 
like wood resembling bronze. This is most elaborately carved and 
undercut in very deep relief; evincing probably a phase of Chinese 
genius rather than Corean ; and possibly a Southern phase in which 
Annamese and Himalyan influences combine with the genius of Go. 
This was originally the central secret deity of the Buddhist auxiliary 
shrines at Tonomine in Yamato. It can now be studied in the art 
school at Tokio. 

Other wooden forms are the portrait statues of this day, of which 
the group of Shotoku Taishi, surrounded by his young children, kept 
in the Taishiden of Horiuji, where the spirit of the prince-saint is still 
worshipped, is the most elaborate. Here we find a timidity and effemi- 



62 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

nacy of curvature in the drapery, which the artist has not quite 
mastered. The faces of some of the children, awkward and even 
Kamskatkan in type, recall the faces of the crude clay figures dug 
from earlier Yamato tombs. Other statues of girls and children retain 
in original paint the very patterns of the dress. Perhaps the finest 
portrait is that of one of the Sojos, said to have been the first abbot 
of Horiuji, installed under the auspices of the prince-priest. Here, while 
we find Corean traces in the pleated folds at the bottom of his robe and 
in the curvature of wrinkles upon the face, in strength and individuality 
it is only a little inferior to the portraits of the eighth century. 

Still another form of wooden Suiko statue is the militant type of 
altar guardian, the group of four statues called the Shi Ten O, or Four 
Heavenly (Deva) Kings, who were set at the four corners of the great 
square altars, facing outward. Early Chinese painted types of these are 
shown in the Amadaji Mandara ; and in the Bisjamon of Seirioji we 
have the slender North Chinese Tartar type of the sixth century. But 
in the four guardian kings of the Horiuji altar, nearly life-size, we have 
the only remaining specimens of the pure Suiko type, whose prototype 
was the group formerly in the Kaidendo of Shodaiji, near Nara, destroyed 
by fire in the early part of the 1 9th century. The peculiarities of this 
type are great. The faces are heavy, square, and almost negroid, like 
the Tori bronzes. The bodies are chunky, and stand evenly straight 
upon both feet, which are encased in a kind of moccasin. Though 
carrying spears, these spiritual warriors wear no armour, unless the fairly 
tight-fitting body- piece, edged upon the statue in openwork metal, can 
be supposed to represent a leathern cuirass. This is bound tightly 
about the waist by a very heavy rope. Over the upper part of this, and 
tied loosely over the shoulders, is a small mantle or shawl, knotted over 
the breast in closely flat ironed lines, and giving a strange Egyptian or 
Persian feeling. But what makes the Persian feeling still stronger is that 
both legs are encased in heavy very loose trousers, which bag about the 
ankles, where a closely ironed rufHe emerges that half covers the feet. 
Twisting ends of a girdle, also flat as if closely ironed, fall nearly to 
the feet from under the cuirass. It is this shawl, these trousers, and 
the element of ironed ruffling that have led me to feel that this type may 
have been built partly out of Sassanian elements. But the strangest 
feature of all is the heavily carved wooden crouching animals upon 
which these figures stand, some cow-shaped but with human hands, 




THE CHUGUJI KWANNON. By Shotoku-Taishi. 



If dc- 
OF THE 
UNIVERSITY 01 



EARLY COREAN AND JAPANESE BUDDHIST ART 63 

themselves supported upon rock forms that curve like Suiko drapery. 
It is recorded that this Horiuji set was carved by two Japanese ; but it 
is possible that the original Shodaiji set may have been brought from the 
continent. It hardly seems possible to believe this the costume of a 
Corean warrior ; it certainly is not Chinese ; and it has no relation to 
any Greek influence such as might be exerted from Khotan. The type 
remains a mystery; but at present we call it provisionally a Go type 
with Persian features, and modified in details by Corea-Suiko ornament. 

Suiko pure decoration is best exemplified by the baldachian hangings 
above the main altar of the Kondo at Horiuji. This, too, is unlike all 
else in the Buddhist art of any known race. These baldachians, of which 
there are several, are a kind of pointed box opening downwards, lined with 
square, rectangular, and triangular panels, many of which show traces of 
stiff painting of flowers and rosettes, and fringed with an intertwisted gold 
tasselling. An upper flaring cornice is covered with very delicate tracery 
in openwork bronze, as in the finishings of the Tamamushi shrine. But 
the whole body of the box, under the cornice and above it, is bossed on 
the exterior by rows of little detached wooden angels upon open brass- 
work flower thrones, or of cockatoo birds in flight. Openwork finials flare 
at the corners. The barbaric painting in reds, blues, greens, and cream 
whites of these stiffly spaced members, of some red much discoloured, 
makes us feel for all the world as if we were looking into an Egyptian 
tomb. The forms of the angels are rounded and slim, and the cockatoos 
curve in strong line, not unlike the forms upon the Chinese Wei relief of 
the sixth century figured by Dr. Bushell. 

I have reserved for the last the greatest masterpiece of Suiko art, a pure 
bit of spiritual interpretation, more sculpturesque, more human and more 
divine than the bronze altar Trinity namely, the large carving from dark 
bronze-like wood of an unornamented Kwannon in contemplation, now 
kept in the little nunnery of Chuguji, in the rear of Horiuji. This follows 
the attitude already shown us by the little bronze statuette of Liang or 
Dzin in the former chapter. The body, modelled like Egyptian, with 
great restrained beauty, is nude to the waist. Even the hair is indicated 
only as a smooth mass slightly relieved from the skin. The drapery, 
falling from a girdle at the waist, heavily envelops the limbs, making fine, 
archaic Greek transitions of curve from the horizontal to the vertical leg. 
The drapery that surrounds the dome-like throne seems to be another 
portion of the same mantle, as in the Buddha of the altar Trinity, though 



64 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

its lines are less flamboyant. But the great beauty of this statue, in which 
it is only equalled by the profile of the Yumedono Corean, is in the face, 
which has its finest effect from the front. It is the face of a sweet, loving 
spirit, pathetic and tender, with eyes closed in inner contemplation. The 
negroid coarseness of the Tori faces has disappeared. 

The impression of this figure, as one views it for the first time, is 
of intense holiness. No serious, broad-minded Christian could quite 
free himself from the impulse to bow down before its sweet powerful 
smile. With all its primitive coarseness of detail, as in the feet 
especially, it dominates the whole room like an actual presence. This 
finely imaginative work, whose genius we can trace from the suggestions 
of preceding models, is clearly the work of an original master mind, 
one capable of transcending conventions, or rather of moulding them 
to express a free spiritual conception. This is why we more than give 
ear to the Horiuji tradition that the work came from the hands of 
Prince Shotoku himself. His was certainly a mind capable of conceiving 
it ; and the varied elements from which he drew suggestions of form, 
Chinese, Corean and Japanese, lay ready to his hand. We must call 
it the first great creative Japanese work of art in the matter of spiritual 
power, as the Kondo Trinity is the first in the matter of decorative form. 



From these promising beginnings of the Suiko age we find the 
young Japanese art advancing through the successive decades of the 
seventh century by leaps and bounds. The next Emperor, Jomei Tenno, 
who ruled from 629 to 641, also favoured Buddhism, and enjoyed the 
advice of a good Minister, Kamatori, who was hailed as the ancestor of 
the great noble family of Fujiwara, in a later age. His contemporary 
portrait has come down to our day. Meanwhile the Tang dynasty in 
China had succeeded the Dzin, and diplomatic relations were opened 
up with it by Jomei. In the next somewhat troubled reign of the 
Emperor Seimei, with interruptions from 642 to 668, Chinese Court 
costumes, rank, and receptions of courtiers were established by imperial 
decree. Corea was partly cut off from Japan through invasion from 
Tang ; and thus, in some sense, Japan was left for the moment to 
her own artistic resources. These were a large stock of originals, mostly 
Indian, Chinese and Corean, and her own budding genius. The art of 



EARLY COREAN AND JAPANESE BUDDHIST ART 65 

this age is a concious recasting in a long series of trial forms of the 
elements involved in this stock. The chief advance is found in the 
series of bronze statuettes which were manufactured for altar pieces of 
the many Buddhist temples that now spread all over Yamato. 
Hokkeiji and Horinji were sites not far from Horiuji ; but the slopes 
of Kasuga mountain, about twelve miles to the east, later to be the 
eastern suburb of the Emperor Shomu's capital of Nara, were 
already the seats of several flourishing temples. There is a per- 
sistent Nara tradition that at one of these, called Iwabuchi-dera, 
a special school of bronze statuette modelling and casting was 
instituted. However that may be, we can trace in the many 
existing remains a clear and fairly single artistic effort to discard 
the clumsier, weaker, and more external features of the primitive 
models, and to aim ever at a more human grace and spiritual sweet- 
ness. If we were to place before our eyes a series of the statuettes of 
Bhodisattwa, we should see clearly this intentional experiment of 
proportion and modelling, the structural elements in many cases re- 
maining unchanged. The draperies become more simple and natural, 
the peculiar shell-like Suiko fold being soon discarded. So graceful 
do the statues quickly become, and so beautiful the faces, that it 
seems as if a specific Greek archaic influence must have been at 
work. It is true that we are here on the historic verge of a Greek 
influence coming down through the Chinese of Tang ; but this is an 
influence not at all of archaic Attic work but of a somewhat late and 
coarsened Greco-Indian proportion. Besides this, Greco-Buddhist in- 
fluence was hardly naturalized in China until after the middle of the 
century, and it was not till then that Japan, under Tenchi, began 
a systematic study of Tang institutions. We must rather believe that 
in the post-Suiko series of small bronzes we have a Greek-like beauty 
which is an independent discovery of the Japanese genius. But of 
course one cannot dogmatically deny that some sporadic intrusions 
from Chinese and Corean sources may have been superadded. 

I can speak here in detail of only a few of the more striking 
members of this series. One early feature is a rounding and broaden- 
ing of the face, which is a Dzin or early Tang trait, as opposed to 
the earlier Go. The lines of mantles and jewelled ornaments, too, 
become more relieved detached something in the style of the wooden 
eleven-headed Kwannon before mentioned. 



66 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

An early form, only slightly removed from Suiko, and possibly 
one that adheres to Horiuji traditions rather than the newer experi- 
ments of Iwabuchi, is the statuette with heavy round negroid head, 
nude to the waist, but with mantle caught up into a large, round, 
knot at the waist. 

A much larger bronze, nearly three feet in height, is the figure 
of Kwannon kept in the storehouse at Horiuji, which is clearly a 
deliberate improvement upon the Korean lanky Kwannon upon the 
Kondo altar. It holds a vase in its half-raised left hand. The 
crown upon the head so protrudes at the sides as to give the effect 
of a flat top. But the body is charming and graceful in modelling, 
and the face pleasant. 

The most beautiful of the standing Buddhas in this statuette series 
is undoubtedly the small figurine, hardly more than a foot in height, 
of the Tathagata of Healing, Yakushi Niorai, symbolical of Buddha 
as the great soul physician. This is the most sacred altar-piece of 
the Shin Yakushiji temple in Nara, of which we shall speak more 
fully in the next chapter. It is beautifully proportioned, the face 
round and sweet, with small nose and delicate mouth ; the hair, like 
that of the Chuguji Kwannon, being only a smooth raised surface. 
The hands and feet, too, are small. But the most interesting feature 
of all is the drapery, which is a beautiful translation into bronze 
designing of the cross concentric folds of the Buddha's mantle, as 
exemplified in the colossal stone images of Ceylon and in the primi- 
tive Chinese wooden Buddha now at Seirioji. Here, instead of the 
countless little crinkly folds of the Indian gauze, we have a few 
simple, clear folds, whose stiff repetition from chest to ankle gives 
the figure much naive dignity. The Suiko folding is entirely eschewed 
in the skirt. Members of this statuette series are also to be found 
in wood, generally as in the Suiko "Aztec" example of an eleven- 
headed Kwannon. 

A decidedly Greek impression is given us by the upper part at 
least of the most delicately modelled Kwannon among the Horiuji 
pieces. Here every detail of costume is but a refined imitation of 
another Chinese one already described as closer to the Suiko type. The 
hands and feet are especially beautiful. The finest view is in profile, 
where the beautiful free lock of hair escaping from the twist at the top 
of the head, combined with the fillet or crown, gives to the head 




BRONZE STATUETTE SHOWING CLEARLY THE 
GREEK INFLUENCE. Temple of Horiuji. 



OF 



EARLY COREAN AND JAPANESE BUDDHIST ART 67 

the effect of a Mercury. The antique Greek effect is enhanced by the 
extreme delicacy and beauty of the features, the mouth and chin 
especially. This is the first Japanese profile which compares in beauty 
with the Corean Yumedono Kwannon of the sixth century. But to 
realize the full beauty of the head and face, and to recognize that, 
after all, it is not Greek, it should be seen enlarged in a two-thirds 
pose. It was thus that I specially photographed it in 1883. The 
little standing Buddha in the crown is a new type with free drapery. 
The hair is beautifully modelled in waves flowing back from the 
forehead. The curves of the brows run unbroken into the nose, 
as in all finest Japanese Buddhist bronzes. The mouth is the most 
naturalistic feature, giving us the most delicately curved surfaces in 
the lips. But what we notice here especially is the perfection of 
casting and finish in all the surfaces, shown particularly in the skin 
of the face, where it appears as if the bronze came with perfect 
satin texture from the mould, requiring no after finish of tool or file. 
This quality is characteristic of the very finest Chinese and Japanese 
bronzes, which are now to come to our notice, and is probably 
obtained by first making a perfect model in wax. An extreme refine- 
ment in such delicacy of finish will be shown in the Tang mirrors. 

Another Bodhisattwa statuette, also of considerable size and kept 
at Horiuji, gives as a whole, though perhaps not so specially in 
the face, the feeling of the archaic Greek Mercury or Athene. The 
head is more spherical than the preceding ; the raised right hand 
is stronger. The feet, the skirt on the bronze pedestal, the upper 
half of whose lotos petals open upward, are like the Shin Yakushiji 
Buddha. What is here most beautiful in the drapery are the festoons 
over the shoulders and breast, and falling from the waist to bind 
the skirt inward at the knee. It is the double curve theme of 
those festoons and of the thin crossing statues that gives this statuette 
its unique beauty. Taking the head, raised hand, and festooned 
breast together, we could hardly avoid, were it not for the some- 
what thick and formal neck, the impression that we were before a 
Greek bronze. It is indeed a beauty parallel to the Greek, but 
one to which a possible Greek element may have remotely entered 
only through the roundabout roads of Baktrian influence upon Han, 
or of Greco-Persian influence upon early Indian Buddhism. The 
specific Greco-Buddhist influence has yet to appear. 



68 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

This brings us down to the age of the next great Emperor, Tenchi, 
whose short reign, beginning in 668, was celebrated by the removal of 
the capital to Shiga, near the present Otsu, on Lake Biwa. The 
famous Karasaki pine, covering more than an acre of ground, is 
believed to be the last relic of his palace gardens. It was he who 
determined to make a more serious study of Chinese institutions, 
and especially of Chinese law, for which purpose he dispatched a 
special mission to Tang. The Emperor Temmei, who reigned as his 
successor till 686, carried on the policy. 

It must have been in one of their two reigns, probably the earlier, 
that' the supreme masterpiece of this rapidly advancing statuette school 
was executed in the same white bronze of which the mirrors were 
composed. It came just at a moment when the delicate problems in- 
volved were about to be overshadowed by new powerful impulses 
surging in from Tang with Greco-Buddhist art. It is a perfect product 
which could have occurred only at this one moment in the history of 
the world, reaching the highest aesthetic range of early Buddhist art 
among any race from India to the Pacific. It is possible that specially 
fine sporadic examples from Tang may have helped to the culmination, 
but we have no trace of them. 

The new piece is a second elaborate Trinity with a screen, and 
seems to have been designed with conscious reference to the earlier 
one by Tori Busshi, as a point of departure. We do not know the 
name of the designer of this, but he is the next greatest artist of 
Japan after Shotoku Taishi, and one of the greatest bronze artists of 
the whole world. 

To realise what enormous artistic gains the gap of some sixty years 
has won for this piece, we ought to compare the two Trinities in a 
single blow of the eye. We should find that the stiff vertical lines of 
the Suiko type have been changed into more graceful and laterally 
interflowing rhythms, and that every delicacy and sweetness of type in 
the statuettes reach their height in the latter piece. It is like passing 
from Egyptian to Greek art. 

The figures of the Trinity are placed much as before, only the 
three all rest upon lotos thrones that grow with twisted stems out of a 
horizontal bronze sea. It is the blessed beings realised in their own 
garden Paradise. And it is doubtless a clearer importation from the 
best of this thought of Sukavhati, the heaven of Amita Rha or the 









BRONZE TRINITY, WITH SCREEN. Horiuji, Nara. 



EARLY COREAN AND JAPANESE BUDDHIST ART 69 

Buddha of Boundless Light, that is embodied in this piece. The 
three statues are fully rounded, detached, and finished at the back. 
Between the Buddha and the screen a magnificent openwork halo of 
bronze lace is set in an independent plane. The screen, which rises 
into pointed waves at the top, and is flanked with panels that might 
fold on hinges, is modelled in three distinct planes of relief, little 
Buddhas at the top, half-round as in the Tori example, blessed figures 
of angels, much flatter, who kneel upon lotos thrones in the back- 
ground, and lotos leaves mixed with flying mantles from those angels 
that form a tracery in very low relief. Once more, within the 
interstices of this elaborate pattern, and into the smooth surface 
of the screen, are incised little cloud forms descending and little 
groups of growing flowers, making as it were a sixth plane for the 
whole design. 

Between this large number of elements on many planes it might 
be thought that, as seen from the front, a certain confusion or at least 
inconsequence would reign. But the truth is that no more unified 
system of curves was ever conceived, even on a Greek faade or 
frieze. Not one of these thousand flowing curves that is not in- 
finitely harmonious with all the others. They interplay like melodic 
phrases in music. The blending of strong architectural plan in the 
composition with naive sweetness in the separate rhythms, can find as 
analogue in Western art only the spirit of the work on Ghiberti's 
bronze doors in the Florentine baptistery. The decorative lines are 
stronger and more orderly than in the naive reliefs at Perugio and 
Rimini of Agostino Duccio. 

The central Buddha is clearly an aesthetic advance upon the 
standing statuette of Shin Yakushiji. While we have lines of drapery 
of the same simple forms, their parallel cross curves are now caught 
up, as in archaic Greek, into converging catenary curves, here firmly 
tangent to the almost vertical line of the garment's edge that falls 
from the left shoulder, and from which other sets of radiating curves 
enfold the left arm. The disposition of this drapery, too, over the 
crossed legs enables the artist to convert horizontal curves directly 
into vertical, thus giving a most beautiful variety. But perhaps 
supreme mastery by the rhythm of line is best shown by the mod- 
eller in his treatment of the hands and the break of the drapery 
from the wrists. The hands and attitudes of the fingers are so 



7 o EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

conceived as to centre into their strong action the curve vitality of 
the whole complicated design. It vibrates to the very tips of the 
ringers, which nod as naively as flower petals on a stern. These 
hands too are thick and firm, like the whole body, not weak and 
effeminate as in some of the Kwannon statuettes. It is noticeable that 
the webbing between the fingers that appears in the larger statues 
of a little later date, is here used not only with structural but for 
aesthetic value, the curves of these webs entering magnificently into 
the contour. This artist knew to the minutest degree the rights of 
conventional treatment in decorative bronze relief; and in this respect 
at least the piece becomes the world's masterpiece. The hair, instead 
of rising into the ugly convention of lumpy curls, as in the Tori 
Trinity, or lying in a quite smooth layer as in the Shin Yakushiji 
Buddha, cuts the latter into a few thinly relieved spiral locks, ap- 
parently a unique convention which does not occur again, being 
apparently displaced by Greco-Buddhist forms. 

The standing Bodhisattwa at the sides are of a grace and sweet- 
ness transcending all the Kwannon statuettes. There is the slight 
sideways swing of the hip noticed in the last wooden eleven-headed 
Kwannon; but a perfect subordination of relief in ornament to the 
decorative value of the figures as wholes, to which the swing of all 
the broad mantles beautifully contributes. The hands here are not 
too small and refined as in the statuettes, but, if anything, just so 
much too large as to act as perfect accents in the architecture of 
the total group. 

In the low relief angels of the screen we find that, studied in 
detail, they only exemplify still further the absolute artistic value of 
this work. Never, down to their smallest detail of drapery, is there 
a lack of invention or of perfect taste in subordinating the inessential 
and the merely pretty to the interpenetrating idea. These figures are 
like, but far more graceful and sweet than the somewhat similar 
bronze angels of China and Dzin, shown in the last chapter. Some- 
how in charm they seem to lie between Orcagna, Donatello and della 
Robbia. No European, however, not even a Greek, ever conceived 
such perfection of formal line and surface in low relief as is shown 
in these lotos forms, and the angels' mantles seemingly caught upward 
into the intense spiral lines of some great spiritual draft. It is this 
prevailing tension of the screen lines toward the vertical which saves 




DETAIL OF SCREEN FROM THE BRONZE 
TRINITY at Horiuji. 



OF 



EARLY COREAN AND JAPANESE BUDDHIST ART 71 

them from what they would often become with Europeans, weak, 
insipid decorative flourishes. 

But to realise what is the true scale of remove here from decorative 
weakness, rather, what is its supreme vitality and power, in a formal 
aesthetic of which elsewhere Greek art is the typical example, we must refer 
to the detached circular halo, which I photographed separately in 1882. 
This consists of a single flat disc, which has not only been perforated in 
the Corean manner, but had every one of its thin surfaces undercut, so 
that not a single member of this narrow scale that does not pulsate with 
finely modelled surfaces in space of three dimensions. Though the execu- 
tion must have been a triumph of bronze-lace casting, yet the vigorous 
plasticity of the curves suggests rapid paring with a knife, the method 
frankly employed in carving the original wax. The body of this most 
beautiful halo in the world consists of three main members : The lotos 
centre, the rich grill interlude of fine crossed curves, and the border of 
arabesques. The lotos centre has itself a centre of the circular seed pod, 
surrounded by sixteen petals, all so exquisitely modelled in the infinitesimal 
relief as to appear like an actual flower. The brilliant colour of this 
member is got by its solidity contrasted with the openwork beyond. The 
grill, in its fine spacing, gives us a grayer colour in two tones, also kept in 
subordination by the simplicity of its forms. But upon the broad circular 
band of the border the artist's whole wealth of purely decorative openwork 
curvature has been lavished. There is nothing here so representative as 
the lotos leaves and stems in the screen relief. This is leaf form, but 
drawn out into splendid scrolls and bands, like the finest Classic and 
Renaissance arabesques. Only these are no imitations of Classic suggestion, 
but a new creation along parallel lines. What the volute and the acanthus 
and anthemion are to Greek ornament, these interplaying organic spirals, 
of large and small curvature, crossing, meeting, intertwisting, are to 
Japanese. It is a glorious thing to know that some creators have been 
able to do this thing without that abject subserviency to Greek pattern 
which Western art has exhibited for two thousand years. There are men 
who can create with the same naivete and beauty as the lonians. And, let 
it be noted, too, that these curves, so intricate, are the farthest removed 
in all art from the insipidity of the Renaissance flourishes, which we 
sometimes teach as a poisonous miasma in our art schools. These 
are curves of extreme tension, as of substances pulled out lengthwise 
with a force that has found its utmost resistance, lines of strain, long, 



72 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

cool curves of vital springing, that bear the strength of their intrinsic 
unity in their rhythms. 

Perhaps I have given too much space to this exquisite Trinity ; but it 
is, so far as I now know, the unique flower of the early East Asian stage of 
Buddhist art. It is fortunate that it could bloom before more powerful 
currents from without and within, already gathering, could tear its archaic 
elements to pieces. It is in these momentarily balanced opportune calms 
in all human history that supreme art arises ; and this is true of Asia as 
of Europe. How utterly then must Art History become a record of the 
causes that have produced unique individuals, rather than non-chronological 
and abstract essays upon industrial technique. 



CHAPTER V. 

GRECO-BUDDHIST ART IN CHINA. 
1th and 8th Centuries A.D. 

IN the history of Chinese art we have already sharply marked three 
periods : the Pacific, the Mesopotamian, and the early Buddhist 
from India. We have seen only the third of these forms falling 
within the limits of Corean and Japanese civilization, though traces or 
the two earlier remain in the barbaric art of Japan. And we have noted 
as the aesthetic culmination of this total complex movement, up to the 
second half of the seventh century, the second Japanese bronze Trinity 
with a screen. 

We have now to look at what is properly a fourth wave of influence 
upon Chinese art, the so-called Greco-Buddhist a wave that was long 
in gathering in Western Asia, swift and brief in its passage across China, 
and somewhat more deliberate in its breaking and dissipating upon the 
shores of Japan. 

It seems strange at first sight to think that Greek art has really 
conquered a second and greater continent on the East, as it has manifestly 
dominated Europe on the West. It will be news to many that such 
a potent factor in what they have always regarded as the romantic 
art of Japan should be that very classic art which they boast as its 
opposite. So potent indeed is the classic spirit that in time it has 
spread to the bournes of the ultimate oceans, and in fact encircled the 
earth. A full account of its slow passage north-eastward across the 
continent of Asia will, some day, fill a most romantic chapter in Art 
History. 

Many immediate doubts rise naturally to the lips If Greek art 
reached Japan by way of China, why did it come so late ? If it was so 
potent throughout East Asia in the seventh century, why should its 
force have been spent so early as the eighth? If China came into 

VOL. I. H 



74 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

contact with Baktria in the second century before Christ, why was it 
not then that Greek art obtained its strongest grip over her ? Since 
Japanese early Buddhist bronzes offer so many analogies with archaic 
Greek art, must not this latter be somehow concerned in the trans- 
mission ? Is the Greco-Buddhist art, after all, of Greek, Roman or 
Byzantine origin ? So difficult have seemed the answers to these and 
other questions that some writers, like Mr. Okakura, seem inclined to 
deny that there has been any classic influence upon Indian, Chinese and 
Japanese art at all just as I am inclined to deny that any specifi- 
cally Greek influence helped model the Japanese statuettes of Tomei, 
Seimei, and Tenchi. On the other hand, Professor Hirth would throw 
back the specific Greek influence as far as the Han. 

If we look at the graphic curve of the ups and downs of Euro- 
pean art as a whole, drawn upon a single time scale, we see that 
it piles into two great and sharply-pointed waves whose summits are 
separated by a gigantic trough of 2,000 years. Our pride is somewhat 
shocked to see that the great European mind has been stricken with 
aesthetic disease and decay during by far the largest part of its 
course. The long, tiresome, and apparently hopeless descent of classic 
art in both Europe and Asia filled more than a millennium. But, upon 
inserting against the same time scale the curves of Chinese and Japanese 
art, we see that their rise to culmination under remote classic influence 
in the seventh century, is contemporary with the moment of deepest 
depression in Europe. A specifically Christian art, the Gothic, rising 
from Greek ruins in the West, comes much later than a specifically 
Buddhist art arising from Greek ruins in the East. Yet it would 
not be surprising if the process upon the two sides presented many 
features in parallel. 

If there were any way of showing how archaic Greek art could 
have got into Central Asia, and then exerted influence a thousand years 
after it was dead in the West, we should eagerly invoke it to explain 
a thousand pseudo-parallels. Not only should we find like technique 
in the convergence of simple catenary curves, and the shell-like openings 
of downwards falling drapery, and in the character of face-modelling, as 
we have already indicated ; but we should discover the identical cork- 
screw curls upon a Buddha's head and in the thick beards of ancient 
Dorian sages and heroes. In aesthetic dignity the simple long folds of 
the Yumedono Kwannon just match those of the Greek bronze 




STATUE OF MAUSOLAS. 



STATUE OF BUDDHA AS AN INDIAN PRINCE. 



IIOT 



Of WE 

! 



GRECO-BUDDHIST ART IN CHINA 75 

charioteer, and the intertwining lines of the three famous figures upon 
a tomb show rich systems of tension curves comparable with the screen 
Trinity. The sway of the figures in the finest Japanese bronzes of the 
eighth century recall that in the winged Victory of the Louvre ; even the 
stocky little short-headed horses of the Parthenon might serve in 
comparisons. And yet we must dismiss all these striking analogies as 
independent growths of a common human genius. 

It is not the great culminating Attic or Rhodian art of Greece that 
pierced its way into the West body of Asia ; but rather a native Ionian 
form that already had found independent, if lower development among 
the cities of Asia Minor. As the Mesopotamian powers, especially 
Persia, spread to those and absorbed them, they left Oriental features 
in their wake. Perhaps there were three waves of intermingling between 
the Eastern Mediterranean and the Euphrates a prehistoric one which 
involved both in Asiatic origins, the Persian domination, and more 
potent still, the Hellenic intermingling that followed Alexander's 
conquest of Syria and Persia. Thus we find among Greeks such a 
purely Asiatic type, we would almost like to say such a Buddhist type 
as the Diana of the Ephesians, with the many forms of relief upon its 
halo, and its multiplicity of function denoted by repetition, as in the 
eleven-headed Kwannon. Greek painted portraits found among the 
tombs of Egypt, indeed the wholer ange of Byzantine figure art is 
stiffly Persian, not to say hieratically Buddhist in its design, and upon 
late Byzantine Christian marble reliefs we find symmetrically arranged 
birds and grape vines, not unlike, but much ruder than ancient Nara 
decoration of the eighth century, and the lovely designs upon Tang 
mirrors. It is noticeable that the twisting stems of such vines are for 
all the world like the lotos stems under the angels upon the Japanese 
bronze screen ; both apparently deriving from Assyrian tree forms of a 
thousand years before Christ. So much for possible reflex waves. 

It cannot be doubted, however, that the remote origin of Greco- 
Buddhist dates from the conquest of Alexander. To be sure, Greek 
influence had already spread Eastward from the Ionian settlements in 
Asia ; but such sporadic transmission was confirmed, rendered official and 
usual, as it were, when Greek monarchs ruled almost as far East as 
India. Megisthus indeed, one of the Greek generals, made friendly 
visits to the Central Indian Buddhist kingdom of Maghada. And yet 
it can hardly be said that Greek aesthetic canons and sculptural technique 

H 2 



76 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

made at first much headway against Mesopotamian formation. For the 

most part, Persian forms were only a little modified ; and the Selencida 

did not hold Persia long. It was rather to the North-East, among a 

freer mountain people, not enervated with ancient Assyrian tradition, the 

Baktrians, that Greek art took specific hold. Here an independent 

dynasty of Greek sovereigns, not tributary to either Antioch or 

Macedonia, maintained itself down to the second century before Christ. 

The sources of Greco-Baktrian art were probably as follows: 

First, the school of Greek sculpture already located and hardened in 

Syria. The type of this is the famous mausoleum of the King of 

Coria, whose name has added a noun to our vocabulary. If we 

compare the very statue of Mausolas with the winged Victory of 

Samothrace, or the Parthenon fragments, for instance, we find, along 

with like technical processes, a great change in aesthetic ideals. The 

lines of drapery are now heavy, unimaginative, and grouped with poor 

decorative intention ; the actual number of convolutions is far fewer ; 

the grace of the figure is lost ; and a method of cutting the eye very 

deeply under a projecting brow has come in. In short, the method 

is coarse and realistic, like certain late phases of Roman work ; and 

the features reveal a materialistic face, a sort of gorged satrap type, 

which seems to indicate the evil influences of Oriental luxury upon 

Greek manhood. That this is quite the type of sculptured figure 

which occurs in the Ghandara relics will shortly be seen. 

Another source, which may have in part counteracted the heaviness 
of the first, was the kind of terra-cotta work exemplified by the Tanagra 
figurines. This, though realistic, found a new kind of grace in their 
slim proportions and plastic movement. It is possible from this very 
attenuated suavity that the thinness which we have noticed in North 
Chinese and Corean early Buddhist bronzes ultimately derives. 

A third source, which would naturally help to confirm the slimness, 
is the seal engraving and the medalling in which Greek art is so 
happy. Here, where whole figures are grouped into a design, a 
tendency to give them a thin line feeling shows a natural aesthetic 
impulse. This prevailing thinness of seal work is characteristic of 
Persian art also. It enters from both sources into the designs of 
Greco-Baktrian coins. Where these are almost pure Greek, they 
show thin classic figures in rhythmic pose or motion, combined often 
with animal forms, of lions and hump-backed bulls of similar 





GROUP OF HEADS FROM THE LAHORE MUSEUM. 



OF THE 
UWVERSITr Of 



GRECO-BUDDHIST ART IN CHINA 77 

attenuation. That this Perso-Baktrian slimness really did condition 
Chinese Han ornament upon the first glazed vases, we have already 
seen in the third chapter. 

A fourth source was, of course, architectural structure and ornament 
the column, the volute capital, the acanthus scroll, the anthemion, and 
other leaf forms. All these are found in endless fragments among 
the Ghandara relics of the Lahore Museum. 

How then can we account for the bodily transference of these 
Greek traditions massed in Baktria to Ghandara kingdoms in the 
north-west corner of India ? When the Chinese Emperor Butei of 
Han sent his first commission to the West 120 years B.C., as men- 
tioned in Chapter II., it was with the primary purpose of tracing 
the migrations of the Yuechi, a prominent Tartar or Scythian band, 
sometimes called the White Huns, who had suddenly vacated their 
seats in Northern Mongolia. The commission found them, after long 
years' search, settled peacefully among the mountain valleys and 
plateaus of that same Baktria which had already enjoyed Greek 
tuition in Art for two hundred years. It was then that the Baktrian 
sources opened up by the great caravan way to the knowledge of 
Han ; though it is hardly to be supposed that, at that difficult dis- 
tance, much in the way of heavy sculpture would have been available 
for transportation. Indeed, the intercourse was too sporadic and indirect 
to lead then to any thorough-going transplanting of a style. If 
Greek art, after centuries of far closer contact with Persia and India, 
had been able to exert so little effect upon their conservative design, 
it is not conceivable that a few small models or drawings, approxi- 
mately Greek, could have transplanted anything like classic technique 
to the alien and distant provinces of China. It is rather in the 
slowly accumulating influence over the Tartar mind of these domesti- 
cated Scythians during a century or more that we must look for 
a possible line of transmission. We know that it was those very 
Scythian tribes, now grown strong, populous, settled, and civilized among 
their Greco-Baktrian adopters, who, somewhere probably in the first 
century before Christ, or at latest just after, grew restless again in 
their contracted seats, envied the rich possibilities of that splendid 
north-west plain where Indus leaps down toward the sea from its 
mountain cradle, and in a series of unrecorded migrations or violent 
campaigns, made themselves masters of it. Here was a Tartar race 



78 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

upon Indian soil, with Greek methods in its hand indeed a fresh, 
hopeful combination. Here, in a great North Indian empire, which 
has been called Ghandara, they lived and ruled for at least four 
centuries, undergoing varying vicissitudes in their peaceful, or warlike, 
influences with the other races of Central and Northern India. 

Yet even this would hardly have availed to perpetuate Greek art 
as a mere remote tradition were it not that here a distinct new work 
was given to Greek art to do that cut it from its decaying roots 
and transplanted it into a new vitality. This work was the creation 
of a complete new iconography for the early stages of a positive 
Northern Buddhism. In strong contrast to the effeminate pessimism 
of the South of India, the races of North India were already restless 
in their efforts to recast the parent faith, or, as they believed, restore 
it to its primitive, ante-metaphysical usefulness. Among these the 
half-polished Scythian conquerors of the North, of fresh, positive, 
healthful mind, found themselves in the position of leaders ; and to 
the capital of their sovereigns, near the present Peshawur, flocked the 
more independent sages of the Buddhist world. It was something like 
a Gothic Emperor Charlemagne saving Roman Europe by fostering 
the first new life of a northern and mediaeval scholarship. And just as 
the spiritual and philosophical leadership of Christendom fell to Scots- 
men, Saxons, and Irish, so did that of Buddha-dom to scholars of 
Mongolian blood. Here it was that Asampho and Vasubandhu for- 
mulated the positive tenets of an idealism so searching and vast that 
it well-nigh surpasses the scope of Hegel, and may yet be recognised 
as the intellectual flowering of Asia. Here, too, the Scythian Emperor 
Kamikka, perhaps in the first century of our era, held that fourth 
Pan-Buddhist council which formulated the larger policy of the North, 
and led to a final split with the metaphysical bishops from Ceylon 
and the South. This was the decisive move which made a deeper 
Buddhism possible for North China and Japan. 

For determining the exact age and derivation of this Scythian move- 
ment in Buddhism, we have much conflicting evidence to sift. That 
it was largely confined to its primitive seats in the Punjab until perhaps 
the third century is probable. Between that time and the sixth it spread, 
in its forms of art at least, to the south-east as far as Java, and to 
the north-east along the Khotan route on the south edge of the 
desert, until it had almost penetrated China. That this slow process 







STATUE OF A SCYTHIAN EMPEROR. 



OF 



GRECO-BUDDHIST ART IN CHINA 79 

involves wave after wave of doctrinal evolution is probable enough ; 
and there is probably no singleness in the transmission of artistic models. 
Nevertheless there seems to be a certain degree of unity to the many 
efforts which for the moment we have to group together as Greco- 
Buddhist art. 

The monuments of this art, as found in the ancient seats of 
Ghandara, have been explored by General Cunningham and others of 
the Archaeological Survey of India, and their ruined fragments, kept by 
the fanatical Hindu iconoclasts of the fourth century, have been collected 
into the museum at Lahore. Lesser fragments are dispersed through 
many of the museums of Europe. 

The relations of this art to the Syrian Greek are especially notable 
in the portrait statues of the Scythian rulers. The drapery is more 
formal, not unlike debased Roman ; but the attempt to give muscular 
detail and the deep cutting of the features is not primitive Indian, 
and has no relation to the cramped Persian. Some of these rnonarchs 
are girdled in festoons of flowers. They wear heavy mustachios. And 
some of the heads of warriors are crowned with a cobra cap. Later 
examples cut the eye in degenerate Greek fashion without depth, making 
only the two lids. 

It is most interesting to compare with these portraits the favourite 
statues of Sakyamuni as a young prince, before his conversion. Here 
he stands in marble effigy, dressed in almost identically the costume of 
the Ghandara grandees, with heavy mantles passing over the shoulders 
and arms, and the luxuriant waving hair, purely Greek in style of 
cutting, descending over the shoulders and caught up in a beautiful 
dome-like lock on the top of the head. A flat circular slab for halo 
relieves the face, which is sometimes round and smiling, now lean, sharp, 
anxious, and almost " Baktrian." The chest, ribs, and abdominal por- 
tions are finely modelled in classic style. 

A most interesting transition can now be marked, in comparing 
the Lahore statues, between these Buddha princes and the detached 
statues, generally seated, of the ascetic Buddha, the Sakyamuni of re- 
nouncement, approximating in its cross-legged attitude to the familiar 
Buddha altar-pieces of so many countries and centuries. Here the robe 
is a single ample garment swathing in its many lines of fold the whole 
body, or all but one shoulder. But the lines of these folds are now 
far more Greek, more realistic, deeper cut, and much more beautiful 



8o EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

than primitive Indian in the folds of the catenary curves. The hair, 
too, at first shows the top lock, though simpler than the prince's curls, 
yet displaying itself as a natural bunch of hair flowing in small waves. 
As hieratic tradition hardens or skill decreases, the lines of the garment 
become more formal, the eyes more prominently set under formal brows, 
the topknot more like a domed excrescence upon the Buddha's head ; 
and the hair waves on both head and knot reduced to formal and 
parallel lines, between which the old lumps reappear as individual curls. 

Among the finest of the Buddha heads, illustrating this transition, 
is that of the so-called Taxila Buddha, a fragment named from its place 
of discovery, the identical place where Alexander fought his battle with 
Porus. It can be seen here that the lobes of the ears were elongated 
and pierced to receive the weight of some heavy jewelled ornament. 
We have already noticed in Chapter IV. that an ornament still remains 
as ear weight in the Chinese Dzin statues. This Taxila head has a 
decidedly Napoleonic cast. In some Lahore Museum photographs it 
is expressly compared with a Greek head, an Egyptian, and a Scythian 
portrait. 

But to realize the wealth of type, beauty, and classic quality of 
Ghandara heads, we ought to study the female or Bodhisattwa portraits. 
Here we find some that are for all the world like Roman portraits of 
ladies in the Naples Museum. The female Bodhisattwa type is very beau- 
tiful, catching the hair up into a domed topknot like the Buddhas, but 
in which there is no suggestion of implied cerebral monstrosity. This 
beautiful form of coiffure remains in the finest Greco-Buddhist statues of 
Japan. There are portraits of old men, too, with long straight falling 
beards, like a tragic mask ; and fine clear-faced youths with riotous curls 
escaping under a Phrygian cap. Other details familiar in Northern 
Buddhism are found on every hand : the lion and the elephant thrones 
for instance. Upon a lion sits a headless youth playing an instrument 
that seems nearly identical with a Chinese biwa. 

But another most notable feature are the architectural panels heavily 
carved with sculpture in high relief, for all the world like degenerate 
Greek on the one hand, and still more like the early Italian revival 
decorations of the Pisani. Here are countless scenes from the life of 
Buddha, the familiar figure being surrounded by figures in turbans ; 
now working in with those dramatically ; now seated enthroned, and 
with the hand raised in attitude of preaching ; and now reclining 




BUDDHIST CARVINGS FROM KHOTAN. 






KHOTAN BODHISATTWA, 
SLIM TYPE. 



PAINTING FROM KHOTAN 
FIGURE ON HORSE. 



Of Vrtr 
UNIVERSITY 01 i 



GRECO-BUDDHIST ART IN CHINA 81 

upon the bier of Nirvana. One of the most beautiful decorations is 
in three concentric lunettes of Buddhist pointed window arches, where 
three groups of figures are well-spaced, the angles of the upper band 
being filled with graceful semi-classic chimeras of rolling snake's body, 
a leaf tail, shoulder wings, a centaur's foot, and a Greco-Buddhist beast. 
Processions of figures with animal heads, serio-comic, are for all the 
world like sculptures on the fa9ade of Orvieto. 

Specially characteristic are the groups of classic figures, masses 
standing, and in half or almost full relief, about the faces of high 
rectangular altars, and separated into panels by columns. Of these, 
some of the finest, though headless, are nude below the hips, with 
thoroughly classical drapery, and, what is more to the purpose, of a 
graceful attenuated proportion which recalls the Ionic statuette type of 
the past, and points forward, as does this very disposition about the 
altar, to the Khotan sculptures of Central Asia. That terra-cottas them- 
selves are not absent in Ghandara is proved by many vigorous clay 
heads of Buddhas and children, and humorous types of old men and 
vagabonds. It is here possibly that we have a connected relic of 
dramatic types descended from Greek comedy, and not unlike Greek 
comic masks. Scythian coins, too, show the persistence of the Greco- 
Baktrian type. 

But if after all this evidence any sceptic were to doubt at least the 
semi-classic origin of this Ghandara art, we could still point to goat- 
like Silenus statues, representations of Athene ; but more conclusively 
than all to the elaborate capitals with their ornaments of fine acanthus 
leaves and the modified volutes of their corners. Here it is startling 
to find a keen realization of the strange combination of East and West, 
in the little graceful Buddha, with head bent in contemplation, and hand 
stretched out for support to a fold of giant Greek acanthus. 

I have given so much space to the description of an art which is 
properly not included in the history of Chinese, partly because it is 
specially interesting to us Westerners to trace the steps of our own 
Greek art in its trans-Asiatic passage to Japan ; partly because its 
Scythian authors are, after all, of the same Tartar race as the Buddhists 
of North China and the Coreans ; but especially because it is this very 
Ghandara art that was studied by the Chinese pilgrim Hiomtsang which 
gradually expanded north-eastward toward the Chinese boundaries, and 
which did eventually in the seventh century make its triumphant and 



82 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

vivifying entry into the new great Buddhist theatre of China, Corea 
and Japan. We can hardly understand the meaning of dominant Japanese 
types at Nara without this reference to their Indian sources. 

How far this Greco-Buddhist art of the North- West affected the rest 
of India is still a problem. It has been supposed that at least it passed 
south-east across India to the port near the topes of Amravati, whence 
ships weighed anchor for Java. Whether the magnificent sculptures of 
Borobodor in the great Southern Island are in reality Greco-Buddhist of 
Ghandara origin, or whether they may not have been developed into 
Greek-like beauty by a fresh island genius, akin to the Japanese, out of 
elements already latent in Ceylonese art I am not called upon to decide. 
But that this wave of civilization from Ghandara passed northward from 
the Indus valley, into the great mountain passes of Balkh and Swat, 
leaving an earlier Himalyan type stranded in the side stations of Cash- 
mere and Nepaul, and advancing over the roof of the world to the 
great Turkestan plain lying beyond the Pamirs, pushing up toward 
Kashgar and Samarcand, and downward again to skirt the southern bor- 
ders of the great deserts which the Kunlung range, with its treasures of 
native jades, separates from Thibet, and so on kingdoms far toward 
the Chinese border, has been verified by the important recent explor- 
ations of Sven Hedin, Mr. Stein of the Indian Government, and others. 
There from the sands of Taklamakan deserts, which, blowing from the 
North, had swallowed up as early as the ninth century populous Buddhist 
Kingdoms, visited and described by the Chinese travellers Fahien 
and Hiontsang, have been dug, and six years since, manuscripts 
written upon leather in the Karasthri script used in Ghandara, and 
clasped with seals impressed by Greek figures, vast altars decorated 
with life-sized relief Greco-Buddhist figures in stucco, Greco-Buddhist 
heads in terra-cotta mixed in the strata with Chinese coins, figures 
of classic females holding a child, clay Buddhas more or less rude 
with the full Ghandara drapery, fragments of great clay halos with 
Buddhas in half relief, and tinted in brilliant colours, and paintings 
upon leather of figures riding horses, whose bodies seem at first like 
modern Persian, but show rounded heads with the Greco-Buddhist 
topknot very close to the heads of the famous frescoes at Horiuji. 
To-day the original wooden posts of these submerged buildings, and 
worn by the storms of a thousand seasons, project in sad desolation 
from the great low plains that stretch for hundreds of miles to the 




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GRECO-BUDDHIST ART IN CHINA 83 

north-east of the Khotan oasis. Khotan was from ancient days the 
centre of this region, and near it the finest and richest of the ruins 
lie. Manuscripts, Karasthri and Chinese, prove that this rich region had 
a flourishing Greco-Buddhist art as early as the third century, and that 
it was destroyed not later than the eighth or ninth. 

Looking at the terra-cotta sculptures of a certain great altar, we 
see that they are almost identical in noble, tall aesthetic type with 
the Greek headless figures on the Ghandara altar. We shall soon see, 
too, their close relations with the Greco-Buddhist sculptures and 
paintings in China and Japan. Here then is the missing link which 
enables us to carry classic proportions and drapery from Baktria 
to China, and eight centuries later than the Western expedition 
of Han. 

In the neighbourhood of Khotan, Mr. Stein visited an early temple, 
perhaps of the third century, where some ancient conqueror, coming from 
the West, perhaps from Ghandara, had become deified into the great 
warrior champion of Buddha in those regions, a Constantine in helmet 
and linked armour who treads down the dwarfed spirits of evil. 
This object of local worship is included among the four great 
archangels of the Buddhist altars, and is specially worshipped in 
separate altar-piece, as we shall see, in his cult imported from Khotan 
into Japan along with its Greco-Buddhist art. The very leather 
boots of these militant figures, into which the trousers are tucked, 
their suits of armour and leather aprons, appear in the Chinese 
sculpture of the next age. 

One more notable feature is that in some of these sculptures, 
which are perhaps later, we find a tendency to great attenuation and 
height, with small rounded head and small waist, which seems to 
imply a new mixture with the older Himalyan type, like that which 
was pouring northward into Thibet, and to foreshadow that slim 
Northern Tartar type of East Asia, which passes into Corean art. 
Certain paintings, too, upon the walls of these excavated houses give 
us the small heads, rounded shoulders and simple colours of the 
earliest Corean Buddhist painting, such as we find as illuminations on 
primitive scripture rolls. 

Perhaps the Khotan pieces of great aesthetic value are few, but 
among others we must point to the very fine terra-cotta head, only 
slightly injured, which will compare very favourably with the Taxila 



84 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

Buddha. We shall regard this in a special sense as an artistic link 
between the latter and the Chinese clay Buddha of Udzumasa. 



We come back now to Chinese art, at the point where we left it, to 
mark the extraordinary harvest sown by it in the adjoining fields of Corea 
and Japan. Already at the end of Chapter III. we have described the 
extraordinary invigoration of Chinese genius due to the sudden fusion 
into the Dzin and Tang empires, apparently for the moment complete, 
of all hitherto separate movements and scattered elements: Buddhist, 
Taoist, Confucian, Northern, Southern, Tartar and Miaotse. The Tang (To) 
dynasty had come in as a military colossus in 618 ; but the great soldier 
and leader of Tang who consolidated Chinese strength and expanded 
it again far toward the West, was the second Tang emperor, Taiso 
one of the greatest and wisest of Chinese rulers, who reigned from 627 
to 650. It was in this great westward expansion that the introduction 
of Greco-Buddhist art was effected. Chinese armies and peaceful missions 
now marched again westward into Turkestan ; and the pious pilgrim 
Hiomtsang stopped at all the famous Greco-Buddhist sites in Khotan, 
Turkestan, Ghandara and Central India, collecting manuscripts, drawings 
and models of every description, which were all safely brought back to 
China in the year 645. 

Meanwhile, communication by sea had been opened up with Sassanian 
Persia ; princes and scholars of the Western kingdom had been received 
as guests in Taiso's capital, and wrote in Persian the world's first careful 
notes of the Middle Empire, which have only recently been made 
available to Europe in translation. There is reason to believe, too, that 
the Byzantine emperors, or their governors in Syria, had held com- 
munication with China, and even implored the assistance of her powerful 
ruler to make common cause against the firebrand Mohammed, who 
was just starting a conflagration on the borders of both. Taiso 
apparently agreed to the alliance, and his armies were preparing to 
advance from Turkestan to the relief of Persia, when the Saracens, 
with Napoleonic haste, frustrated the junction by driving a wedge 
eastward across the Chinese path. 

One seems forced to trace some providential meaning in this second 
blocking of a direct union between Europe and Asia. Only twice in 
Chinese history was it conceivable that Celestial commissioners should 
have fraternized with Roman ; once about the time of Christ in the Han 




CLAY HEAD OF A BOY DUG UP AT KHOTAN 
By permission of Dr. Aurel Stein. 



..<nr 
OF THE 
UNIVERSITY Of ILLINU' 



GRECO-BUDDHIST ART IN CHINA 85 

dynasty, the first Chinese expanded empire ; and again in the second 
great Chinese empire, the Tang (To) of the seventh century. Both were 
powerful enough to pierce a continent ; both were anxious to meet face 
to face the renowned Rome of their day. But Parthian trade jealousy 
had blocked the first meeting in the days when Western Rome had 
started on her decline ; and now Mohammedan religious fanaticism was 
to block the second when Eastern Rome already felt weak before the 
foe that was to dismember and destroy her. 

Here is the true explanation of why Greco-Buddhist art was so 
late in reaching China, and why its contact was so brief and its force 
so rapidly spent. It was a tragic moment for the whole East, a mere 
touch-and-go. This new Ghandara Buddhism with its fine art had 
been smouldering at the very western gates of China for three cen- 
turies, but the weakness of internal dissension had helped the barriers 
of the desert. Just now, when the power of Tang was fraternizing, 
after a lapse of 400 years, with Khotan, Kashgar and North- Western 
India, and claiming share in the great religious harvest, it was all 
about to be blotted out by a mighty Saracen sirocco that would soon 
obliterate its faintest trace and change the whole current of Central 
Asiatic thought and art for ever. It was high time that Hiomtsang 
should go the rounds, make notes and amass relics before the great 
black curtain shut down. Destruction lay for Buddhism on every 
hand, not the Mohammedan blast alone, but a threatened final on- 
slaught of the Northern sands that had already swallowed kingdoms, 
and a fanatical rising in India itself, which was to wipe out the 
peaceful monasteries from the Peninsula in a wave of darkness and 
blood. 

So much for the reason why Greco-Buddhist contact was short. 
But in China itself the new inspiration was enthusiastically welcomed 
by the Buddhist party. Hiomtsang and his relics were installed in a 
rich temple, and he given charge of a body of scholars to translate 
and interpret the manuscripts he had brought. We have Chinese 
evidence that Khotan art rapidly penetrated eastward. Scions of the 
royal house of Khotan became guests in China, were naturalized, and 
brought in their national arts, of which the records of painting declare 
that the new style modelled the Buddhist figures into an appearance 
of full relief. No examples of this kind of painting exist, unless, as 
I suspect, it be partially preserved in the great frescoes at Horiuji, 



86 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

which I am soon to describe. Along the newly re-opened route 
learned immigrants, driven, perhaps, by already growing disturbances 
in the South, came up over the mountains from India, bringing the 
germs of a new esoteric Buddhism which was to flame into pro- 
portions of grandeur in the next century. 

It is possible that the early Chinese landscape, painted in oil upon 
leather in the Horiuji collection, and showing Tartars on a white 
elephant in the foreground of a great valley lighted by a sunset, belongs 
to this early Tang date, though I have already conjectured its attribution 
to the sixth century. But if we compare the statue of the Khotan 
hero, Bisjamon, now in Toji of Kioto, with the Dzin or pre-Dzin 
example in Seiroji, we shall see how much richer modelling and grace 
Chinese art was absorbing. Here the details of the armour fully 
carved, and the group upon which the warrior stands, a female with 
Greco-Buddhist top-knot in the centre, flanked with large headed dwarfs 
or barbarians, exactly correspond with features of the stucco Bisjamon 
unearthed by Mr. Stein near Khotan. Of late seventh century is another 
fine Chinese Bisjamon, somewhat weather-worn, kept in the Japanese 
temple of Udzumasa. 

In North-West China, near Suifu, is cut into the face of a great 
sandstone cliff the whole paraphernalia of a Buddhist paradise, the 
Trinity on thrones, a congregation of the faithful in realistic grouping 
at the sides, and great terraced stories of palace temples at the back. 
Here the disposition of the drapery, rather than the grace of the 
figures, leads us to ascribe Greco-Buddhist origin. But smaller Chinese 
carvings of the same subject, some in closable pocket shrines of wood, 
show much more clearly the Greco-Buddhist style. 

But the finest and most classic forms that have come down to our 
day from this brief movement, of which there is no clear connected 
account in Chinese history, are the great statues, miniatures, and relief 
tablets, done in marble, in hard-baked clay, and in soft composition 
clay. The marble statues of Buddhist deities, full-size and very beau- 
tiful, were found lying buried beneath the grass that covers ruined 
mounds, in the outskirts of the present Western capital of Singanfu. 
Just here stood the early capital of Tang, nearly upon the ruins of 
the early capital of Han, and close by the site of the capital of the 
still earlier founders of Chow. What a field for the archaeologist of 
some future century, who will have been able to overcome the 











THE SOFT CLAY STATUE OF BUDDHA SEATED, 
at Udzumasa, near Kioto. 



UBR.ARY 
OF THE 
UNIVERSITY Of i 



GRECO-BUDDHIST ART IN CHINA 87 

superstitious dread of excavation; and who will find, layer after layer, 
first at the bottom the veritable bronze vessels and unglazed shards of 
Chow ; next the walls and bas-reliefs of Han ; and then the broken 
columns and prone altar pieces in marble of the Greco-Buddhist 
monasteries of Tang (To). 

Samples of the hard clay reliefs, in graceful, crisp, and exquisite 
finish, not unworthy of the Japanese bronze Trinity, are preserved in 
Horiuji. Here the grouping is almost identical with some of the 
panels of the Horiuji frescoes. The placid Buddha sits on a throne 
with feet not drawn up into the cross-legged attitude, but falling over as 
if from a chair, and resting upon a lotos footstand below. The lines of 
single drapery here, disposed in a new fashion, are crisp and wonderfully 
beautiful. Graceful Bodhisattwa are at the side, shaven monks in the 
background. Fragments of the elaborate halo are beautifully plastic. 

But the most typical example of Chinese Greco-Buddhist art is 
probably the soft clay sitting statue of a Buddha, kept at Udzumasa 
near Kioto. There is no clear record that this is Chinese ; tradition 
had rather called it Corean. The Japanese would probably like to 
claim it. But, even in the clay figures of Sangetsudo, there are no 
Japanese examples of such realistically plastic modelling, quite omitting 
all such decorative line passages as we find in the bronze statuettes. 
Here the figure is clearly Greco-Buddhist, quite like the first Ghandara 
Prince Sakyamuni, of the Lahore Museum; but more powerful in 
conception and execution, in proportioning and spiritual presence, 
than any Indian piece. The great heavy folds are deeply cut as if 
by firm pressure of the thumb, quite as we block out the masses 
in our wet clay models. The small curls in the hair, too, are like 
waxy lumps which we had just pinched together with three fingers. 
Perhaps some of the roughness is due to repairs ; but it seems 
probable that this statue was left undecorated and as massively virile 
as an untouched photograph. The profile, too, is almost as fine as 
the Yumedono Kwannon. That this statue became in a clear sense 
the model for the colossal Japanese bronze Buddhas of the Wado 
and Yoro epochs can hardly be doubted. 

One more phase of Greco-Buddhist art in China must be touched 
on, namely the white bronze mirrors. We know from Chinese records 
that the proportion of metals in their alloy was nearly equal parts 
of copper and tin. The more common forms of these circular 



88 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

mirrors is to fill many elaborate concentric bands with astronomical 
and necromantic symbols mixed with delicate Chinese writing. These 
symbols show actual constellations, or groups of triglyphs from the 
Y-king categories, the tortoise and hoo-bird, and the so-called zodiacal 
animals. These are manifestly in subject of Chinese origin, and only 
in their delicacy of tracery superior to the gems of such Taoist 
symbolism found in Han. More graceful mirrors than these are 
figured in the Chinese archaeological books sometime as Han, 
where the most delicious arabesque traceries clasp into spirals the 
vivacious outlines of hoos and lions ; while flowers, butterflies and 
birds on wing fill the ten-pointed star of their border. But by far 
the most beautiful mirrors are those entirely covered with exquisitely 
modelled relief, almost surpassing the Japanese angel screen in easy 
grace and perfect finish, of heron-like birds flying among grape vines 
in the border; and animals that look now like a lion, now a bear, 
and now a squirrel, plunging among still stronger compositions of 
grape bunches in the centre. The hollow piece that holds the 
string is as like a glorified frog on a Han bronze drum. We have 
already spoken in Chapter II. of the controversy over these pieces ; 
how the Chinese books call them Han, how Professor Hirth argues 
that they are Han; but of the aesthetic impossibility how, judging 
from examples I have yet seen, my sincere doubt that they can be 
Han; that they are not pure Greek, though Greek-like in effect, seems 
clear. We find the grape-vine pattern used upon late Greek work, 
but with nowhere this degree of grace. These pieces, of which many 
large specimens are kept in the Shosoin storehouse at Nara, must for 
the present be ascribed by me to an inner decorative flowering of 
Chinese genius to perfect with Chinese shapes rude motives that may 
be derived from Ghandara. We shall speak of these once more under 
Shosoin. 

We have already explained why this specific Greco-Buddhist move- 
ment in China was cut away at the stem before it had absorbed 
sufficient vitality from the parent root to render it more than a 
sporadic form. Pure Chinese causes working from within, making 
nobler use of native elements, forgetting the pagan non-symbolic grapes 
and squirrels, and substituting more Chinese proportions and rich 
passages of brush delineation for tall and realistic Buddhist modelling, 
were about to follow the rapid rise of Tang poetry to the veritable 



GRECO-BUDDHIST ART IN CHINA 89 

splendour of an illumination. By the year 698, when the Emperor 
removed his capital far to the east, at Loyang,* this momentary 
quickening had well-nigh ceased. 

It seems a tendency with some writers to claim all that followed 
for centuries in Chinese and Japanese art to the credit of the 
Greco-Buddhist movement ; but this is to confuse classifications. In 
this work we aim to seize the peculiar creative impulse of each 
period, and thus explain the uniqueness of its art. Judged by such 
aim the Khotan influence was brief, and the specific form only in 
part assimilated. It is doubtless true that a certain legacy of 
nobleness and grace was left to later ages by this brief passage, just 
as a certain naive solidity was deposited by Han but little that 
is specifically of Greek type. No doubt Chinese art grew with 
every step, incorporating successive powers ; but the elements that 
now entered into the quick evolution of Tang were more internal, 
spiritual, and formally Chinese. 

* Japanese pronunciation "Ralcuyo." 



VOL. I. 



CHAPTER VI. 
GRECO-BUDDHIST ART IN JAPAN. 

The Culmination of Sculpture Nara. 

LET us observe now the outflow of this sudden classic wave in China 
to Kingdoms lying on her eastern border. Tang (To) ambition 
had essayed to annex Corea in 645, and temporarily succeeded 
in 668 ; thereby almost leading to serious friction with Corea's friend, 
and nominal superior, Japan. This is why Japan was so much more 
cut off from Corean contact in the seventh century than in the sixth, 
and why she was forced first to evolve art from within, second to be 
influenced by Tang. Corea, too, could not avoid this influence ; and we 
have evidence that her art, already so fine, was lifted up into something 
like new Greco-Buddhist proportions before the end of the century. 

The royal palace in Seoul, set in the midst of fine gardens, with 
its beautiful carved marble terraces, railings, bridges and columns, 
and its specially fine swing of tiled roof, shows clear traces, through its 
many rebuildings, of that great day when Corea was swayed by Tang. 
It is not certain whether the cream glazed pottery for which Corea 
afterward became so famous can date from this seventh century. But 
we have one large Corean bronze of the first rank, which was presented 
from the continent toward the end of the century, and which exhibits 
clearly the Greco-Buddhist influence, though in combination with invete- 
rate Corean traits. This is the splendid life-sized standing Kwannon, 
worshipped as the central altar-piece of the Toindo pavilion in Yaku- 
shiji, near Nara. 

To mark exactly what Corean art has gained and possibly lost 
in the interval of a century, it is a privilege to compare this Toindo 
Kwannon with the Yumedono Kwannon of almost similar size described 
in Chapter III. In these two pieces we have the supreme summits 
so far as we now know of Corean art. 




T 



ra 

"3Mi 














OF TMf 
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GRECO-BUDDHIST ART IN JAPAN 91 

The later Kwannon stands a little stiffly, with almost no hip-sway, 
upon a new type of lotos throne, the upper petals of which rise stiffly, 
like an artichoke, from an octagonal box member whose curving sides 
are decorated with relief flower scroll that may well be modified 
acanthus. The modelling of this bronze throne is of the utmost power 
and semi-classic beauty. The lower part of the figure retains much of 
South Indian and early Corean feeling, with its drapery close winding 
about the legs, the fine outward swing of Go folds at the side, and 
the somewhat thin and wiry mantle that twines to the feet over shoulder, 
hips, and arms. But in the upper half of the body we return to an 
approximately Greco-Buddhist type : primarily the proportion, the fine 
long chest and slightly suggested swell of the bosom, the graceful waist, 
the long arms, the small well-modelled hands, and especially the small 
beautifully ovalled head. The hair is of the pure Greco-Buddhist 
Bodhisattwa type, the very large top-knot being encased in a filigree 
net with conventional scrolls. Finely moulded jewels encircle the neck, 
crisply relieved from the satin texture of the skin. Above all, the face 
possesses great beauty, enhancing under its semi-classic sweetness that 
beneficent mysterious smile which we noticed in the Yumedono and 
Chuguji Kwannons. It remains to add that the bronze of which it 
is composed is of a lovely yellow brown, an alloy which the Japanese 
Buddhists call "Embudagon," but which was rarely attempted by them. 
It may be said that this was the first large bronze statue ever seen in 
Japan, and that it had immediately great influence upon Japanese work. 

It is possible that the colossal bronze-seated Buddha of Kanemanji, 
which we are soon to describe, is also a Corean masterpiece of this 
date. There is no record of the fact ; indeed, all tradition regarding 
it is lost ; but it has almost as clear a golden tone in its alloy as 
the Embudagon Kwannon ; and the folds of drapery about the 
body and legs, though large and grand, are somewhat wiry and formal, 
and like the lower portion of the Toindo Kwannon. It seems more 
probable that it is a first Japanese experiment made with Corean material 
and under the influence of Corean genius. 



Let us pass over the Straits of Tsushima, and resume our study 
of Japanese art where we dropped it at the end of the fourth chapter. 
We had there watched Japan's long series of experiments with bronze 
statuettes culminate in the brilliant Trinity of the Angel screen. We 

I 2 



92 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

make this the dividing line, because almost immediately after this 
achievement strong Chinese imperial and Greco-Buddhist forces were 
to sweep all such experiments away into new and wider channels. 

The study of Chinese institutions begun by the Emperor Tenchi 
was followed up by his successor, Temmu, and the latter's widowed 
Empress, Jito. The latter in 690 organized the ladies of her palace 
into a corps of' female officials. She also established a mint. But 
her greatest achievement, though now ruling as a retired Buddhist in 
the name of her son, was the drafting and first promulgation of the 
great Taihorio code of laws in 702. These were based on a deep 
study of Chinese precedent, and had for their primary object a just 
redistribution of the land, which had been absorbed by the nobles, 
among the agricultural population at a fixed rental. A separate soldier 
caste, with special privileges and means of support, was devised. 
Moreover, the Empress and her young protegt held quiet receptions 
of nobles and officials in the palace of Daikiokuden, quite in the style 
of Chinese sovereigns. Confucius, too, was publicly worshipped for 
the first time, along with Buddha. A student of the new Chinese 
mysticism, En no Gioja, came over to Japan, but was not well 
received. 

These incidents are mentioned chiefly to call attention to the 
enormous influence upon Japan which the vigorous Empire of Tang 
was exerting ; and with it could not fail to intrude the new aesthetic 
canons of the Greco-Buddhists. Already the clay Buddha of Udzu- 
masa and the terra-cotta tablets must have been imported, and this 
Corean bronze Kwannon of Toindo lay ready to hand as additional 
motive. It was apparently in the western side of the Nara plain, 
close up under the sand hills, and a little north of the present 
town of Koriyama, that the first great experiments in Japanese Greco- 
Buddhist art were made. Here stands Yakushiji itself with the 
Toindo ; and just south of it lies Shodaiji, an institution founded a 
little later, but probably on an early Buddhist site. Here, amid a 
mass of broken statues and interesting refuse, I found in 1880 a 
life-sized piece which seems to have been one of the original Greco- 
Buddhist models, or at least experiments. It is like a great doll 
of wood, apparently finished into surface with over-layers of modelled 
clay. The Greekish modification of Indian drapery over the legs 
is under-cut in deep, strong catenary folds ; the body, nude above 



UB 
OF 
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GRECO-BUDDHIST ART IN JAPAN 93 

the waist, shows strong markings of the primary muscular tracts ; 
the long, tapering arm has been separately modelled and set into 
the shoulder with a plug ; the neck is short, the head rather too 
large, but semi-Greek in profile, and a projecting plug shows where 
a top-knot was added to the Greco-Buddhist hair. 

But our enumeration of the sources of Japanese Greco-Buddhism 
would be inadequate without the famous frescoes that now completely 
cover the inside surface of the four outer walls of the great Kondo at 
Horiuji, five miles to the west of Koriyama. I have described this 
first great temple of the Suiko age in Chapter IV. ; and there I mentioned 
that a great fire about 680 ruined the first erections, with the possible 
exception of the gate, the pagoda, and the Kondo. Some Japanese 
archaeologists believe that these, too, are not the original structures, but 
belong to the general rebuilding, which must have been achieved under 
Greco-Buddhist influences coming from China ! I will not repeat the 
arguments there briefly canvassed ; but go on to assert that the great 
frescoes of the Kondo, whether the original building was old or new, 
must surely have been painted at this time. The low pent-house which 
runs about the lower story, injuring its effect, was doubtless no part of 
the original architecture, but a device either added to the old building 
to protect the frescoes from exterior damp, or added later to the new 
building, as it was found that protection would be needed. In either 
case, the interior of the Kondo presents a strange agglomeration of 
styles ; the whole altar, most of the statues thereon, and the great hang- 
ing baldachins being purely Suiko, while the frescoed walls behind them 
and a few of the statues are purely Greco-Buddhist. 

It seems good to call these elaborate paintings frescoes, since they 
form one of the very few examples of mural painting on plaster which 
have come down to us in Eastern Asia ; but it is improbable that their 
method was pure fresco, that is, of the application of the pigment to a 
wet surface : rather does it seem certain that the chipping off" of the 
colour shows that it was applied to the dry finish of the wall, quite as 
it might have been painted over paper, silk, or wood. Some English 
travellers have exclaimed before these Horiuji frescoes upon their likeness 
to the wall paintings in the Adjunta and other Buddhist cave-temples in 
Northern India. But it seems to me that between the two aesthetic 
types there lies a wide gap. It is true that in both we find the flesh 
afterward outlined in red, and that somewhat similar Indian types are 



94 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

found in both. But in all that concerns esthetic classification, in spacing, 
in proportion, in line dignity and solidity of colouring, and in the noble 
presentation of spiritual beings, the Horiuji panels, though East Asian, 
have far more merit than the more sensuous, squirmy, crowded and 
over-ornamented Indian examples. In the latter little of Greek pro- 
portion and suggestions remains. It seems fair to conjecture that, 
granting the existence in Ghandara of great Greco-Buddhist frescoes, they 
and the cave works may have slightly influenced each other ; the pro- 
portion of the Greek element being far greater in the Ghandara. It 
would then happen that the Horiuji paintings, derived from Ghandara, 
would present certain features that Ghandara shared with Ajunta. It is 
interesting in this connection to compare the best of the Horiuji 
compositions with the classic frescoes unearthed at Pompeii ; and to 
realize that here we have almost surely a real, though remote, genetic 
connection. 

The long band of Horiuji frescoing, broken only by the four doors 
which cut the centre of the four walls a band of some 300 feet in 
length by 15 in width is broken into separate quadrangular com- 
positions of varying proportion, the largest of which show seated 
Buddhas, some with down-falling feet, standing Bodhisattwas of tall 
Greek type not always stiffly in pairs as members of a trinity, but in 
groups of two, four and more and holy men as spectators in the back- 
ground, quite as in the Ghandara fragments. The Buddhas' halos are 
circular ; rich painted baldachins overhang, and flying angels with 
backward sweeping drapery descend from heaven with dropping flowers. 
Other groups have only dignified Bodhisattwa without Buddhas. These 
always have the great domed Greco-Buddhist top-knot, not as formal in 
line as the sculptures, but painted wavy, as are also the loose locks that 
fall on the shoulders, much as the hair falls in the Ghandara marble 
princes. The colours are rich and deep, dark claret and green garments 
for the Buddhas, and dark reddish or purple flesh tones for their faces ; 
but gayer warm tints for the bodies and the faces of the feminine 
types. 

Who painted these unique frescoes we do not know. The temple 
guess that it was Doncho, one of the Corean priests who came over for 
Shotoku, is nonsense. It is hardly possible that any Japanese artist 
who might have studied in China could so perfectly have mastered 
an alien style. It seems far more likely that the author was either an 



J 



ut , 




GKECO-BUDDHIST SCULPTURES IN STONE. 

From the Crypt of the almost vanished 
Temple of Gangoji, in Nara. 



OF 



GRECO-BUDDHIST ART IN CHINA 95 

imported Chinese master who had worked under Michi Itsung or some 
other devotee of the Khotan style, or possibly a so-called " Indian," 
that is, not necessarily a native of India proper, but an importation from 
Khotan itself or from farther Turkestan. In either case we ought 
properly to have described these works under the heading of Chinese 
Greco-Buddhist art in the earlier part of this chapter. But because 
of their relation to the history of Horiuji, and of their dominating 
influence upon the Greco-Buddhist style in Japan, I have deliberately 
postponed the account to this point. Enough to say that the proportion 
and grace of these painted deities could never be made to coalesce 
with the influence of such imported sculptural types as the Udzumasa 
Buddha and the Toindo Kwannon. 

The influence of these paintings and of the small clay relief upon 
Japanese sculpture of the age of Temmu (673 688), is clearly seen in 
some remarkable large reliefs in stone in the crypt of the almost vanished 
temple of Gangoji in Nara. These are deeply chiselled out of solid 
slabs of stone let into the wall. The chief of these consist of a very 
beautiful eleven-headed Kwannon, and several Trinities. The style of 
the Kwannon retains some trace of the bronze statuettes ; but the lines 
are more suave and the proportions are newer. The figure has been 
cut out of a niche, and stands in such high relief as almost to seem 
detached. It is perhaps Japan's finest piece of stone sculpture. The 
Trinities are arranged in the regular Greco-Buddhist style, but the 
spectators are omitted. The Bodhisattwa sway strongly at the hips. 
Suiko Ghandara lions crowd up by the Buddha's footstools. The flame- 
shaped halo is retained from Corean models ; but within the Buddha's 
is a round Ghandara halo. In one instance, instead of a baldachin, we 
have the sacred tree carved in flat relief, with concentric bands of leaves ; 
a persistence into Buddhism of Han art derived from Mesopotamia. 

But soon a new discovery in Japan lent weight to the coming change. 
In 708, the first year of the Emperor Gemmei of the Wado period, copper 
was discovered in Japan in large quantities ; and thus it became possible 
to make bronze images of large size. For the statuettes of the preceding 
age most of the metal had to be imported. Now it became no longer 
necessary to limit the scale of work, for which the Greco-Buddhist models 
demanded generous proportions. The imported Toindo Corean Kwannon 
set the pace ; and thus in bronze sculpture we now have splendid statues 
of life-size or larger replacing the statuettes. 



96 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

The style of this new and culminating bronze work may be described 
as a synthesis between the new Greco-Buddhist ideals coming from China, 
and the qualities of the statuettes themselves. We have seen what wonder- 
ful delicacy of feeling and what finish of surface could be obtained in the 
Trinity with the angel screen. It is possible that some of the more graceful 
features of this may be due to a first partial introduction of the new Greek 
forms. But Japan was rather too far removed from the Central Asian 
sources to absorb Ghandara canons in their purity ; so that they may be 
said to have acted rather in the way of enhancing, dignifying, and broaden- 
ing the excellences already found in germ in the statuettes. With this 
modification, Greco-Buddhist art, such as it is, really comes to take deeper 
root in Japan than in China, just because the native genius was more 
adapted to it. In China it only advances art one peg toward the Tang 
culmination of 730. In Japan it becomes itself the very culmination of 
the first period. 

The groups of large bronze deities which belong to this culminating 
age, Wado and Yoro, from 708 to 721, and which now remain for our study, 
are chiefly four. The earliest is probably the great Kanimanji Buddha 
already mentioned, which may possibly be Corean, or possibly made in 
Japan of Corean metals earlier than 708. This we have already described. 

The next group is the trinity of colossal statues now set up in the 
Kodo or lecture hall of the temple of Yakushiji, in the western suburbs of 
Nara. The history of this most interesting temple is obscure ; but 
probably it was originally founded somewhat to the north of its present 
site ; and it is said that this Kodo trinity was cast as its main altar-piece. 
When the temple burned a few years later, it was rebuilt on its present site 
about 716 ; and aesthetic taste having advanced with strides during the 
short interval, the awkwardness of the old altar group caused their abandon- 
ment to the secondary building or Kodo, the finer black trinity being newly 
cast for the new Kondo. This first Yakushiji trinity, which is considerably 
larger than life, show clear traces of its dependence upon the statuette 
model. It is just an expansion of these to new scale, with an evident 
effort to achieve new proportions and realistic modelling. In spite of such 
criticism, the Buddha is very fine, the drapery falling over the shoulders 
more in the Chinese manner than does that of the Kanimanji figure. 
Nothing of that hard Corean fold line here remains. A very original 
method has been tried in swathing the upper of the crossed feet in their 
drapery ; but the legs and feet have apparently been made too insignificant 




THE BODHISATTWA STANDING AT THE LEFT OF THE YAKUSHIJI TRINITY. 

From the Black Bronze Trinity at Yakushiji. 



Ufr 



GRECO-BUDDHIST ART IN JAPAN 97 

and thin, in trying to get away from such an enormous exaggeration as the 
Kanimanji Buddha gave them. The hair is not flat as in the latter, but 
covered with wavy short curls. The support is an immense solid circular 
lotos throne, which, while fine for statuettes, takes on a certain awkward- 
ness from the excessive scale. The standing Bodhisattwa are impressive, 
but somewhat fail in reaching perfect naturalness in the hip-swing. 

This old temple of Yakushiji contains one more feature which I 
ought to notice before coming to the Kondo, and that is the ancient 
pagoda, which was saved from the fires that destroyed the Kondo and 
Kodo a few centuries ago, and perhaps dates from Yoro. It is unique 
in the varying breadth of its stories, achieving an original impression 
in Buddhist architecture. 

But perhaps the most powerful aesthetic grip that will seize the 
astonished traveller in Japan will burst upon him as he turns to the 
north, and enters the broad open doors of Yakushiji's Kondo and faces 
the forty-foot breadth of the great stone altar with its trinity of colossal 
statues in shining black bronze, relieved against enormous boat-shaped 
halos of gold. These halos are new, the original, undoubtedly of bronze, 
having been probably melted in the great fire. Other figures of Yakushi's 
generals, of modern clumsy form and garish colouring, help to mar the 
unity of the group. Moreover, the space in front of the altar of the 
modern building is so narrow that no single front view of the three 
wonders can be obtained. It is only by photographing them far at the 
side that we can obtain them in a single composition, by no means 
their best view. We must be content then to study each for itself 
premising that the whole group is made of a black polished bronze 
perhaps the same alloy heavy in gold called Shakudo, and often used 
for small sword ornaments as black as ebony, and which the con- 
flagration could only slightly injure. 

Taking the Bodhisattwa first the Sun and Moon goddess, so-called, 
who attend Yakushi as Kwannon and Seishido Amida we may say 
that every precaution has been taken to guard against the defects of 
preceding examples, large and small. The figures, of perfect grace and 
restrained sway, are neither attenuated nor stout, but of solid, sub- 
stantial proportion, the head given dignity by the specially large 
Greek top-knot. The muscular contours of the body are revealed with 
perfect restraint. The drapery about the legs is far freer and purer 
in fold than the Toindo model. The double curved systems of linked 



98 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

jewels, and of the thin mantles, are so perfected and harmonized as to 
carry the beauties of the screen trinity up to the grandeur of the 
new scale. They are, perhaps, the finest standing bronze figures of the 
whole world. The chasing of the surfaces of hair and crown give a 
splendid contrast of dusty colour with the liquid black of the flesh. 

The Buddha is a splendid compromise in proportions between the 
big head and legs of Kanimanji, and the weak features of the Kodo. 
The lines of drapery have less decorative depth than the screen 
trinity. The head is modelled into a splendid front oval, but gives 
a sharp profile quite like the Udzumasa clay Yakushi. The flow of 
the drapery over the left arm and across the left knee is as beautiful 
as the rhythms in a genuine Greek statue. The left hand, too, is 
as beautifully modelled as the Buddha's of the screen, and, although 
being webbed, of more realistic proportions. 

A word must be added about the great massive bronze box or 
throne, upon which the Yakushi sits, and over the front of which his 
falling drapery pours. This is unique in Asiatic art, and hard to 
classify, though it seems pretty clear that its elements must have come 
in with waves from Chinese Tang concomitant with Greco-Buddhist. 
The edge of the upper projecting band is beautifully done in vine 
scroll-work, strongly recalling the grape-vine mirrors, and very close 
to the grape-vine scrolls of later Greek work. The panelled rosettes, 
lozenges and crosses of the four other bands, also in low relief, bear 
relation to primitive designs found among the tribes that live along 
the Amoor region, and which we find in some Han decoration. A 
long low writhing dragon, in the middle of one of the side bands, 
seems to be a transition from the dragon type of Han to that of 
Tang. But the most remarkable and unique features are the groups 
of crouching figures, two and two, set within decorative Buddhist arches. 

These show a most realistic representation of dwarfed figures of some 
negrito race, nearly naked, and with enormous heads of fuzzy hair 
like the Somali peoples in Africa, or the Negritos of Borneo, Australia, 
or the Philippines. It seems as if these have been studied as types 
of a lower world, sub-human, which Buddhism came to dominate, or, 
as a theosophist would say, relics of a third race. It is probable 
that the genius of the artist here substituted these realistic forms for 
the Greco-Buddhist dwarfs or imps. But the most incredible feature 
of all is the built-up pillar at the back, held by a grotesque figure with 




YAKUSHIJI BLACK BRONZE TRINITY 
seen in profile. 



" 



GRECO-BUDDHIST ART IN JAPAN 99 

fish tails instead of legs. This seems indeed to be a deliberate re- 
importation, based upon contemporary studies of Polynesian life, of the 
principle in ornament of the totem pole. It is of course more 
beautifully and conventionally rounded than in any Polynesian specimens. 

Taking the Yakushiji group as a whole, it does not seem extrava- 
gant to say that its aesthetic value would alone repay a student the 
whole time and expense of a trip from America to Japan. What a 
ripe genius its author must have been ! And fortunately we know him, 
the third identifiable personality in our list of great Japanese sculptors, 
coming nearly a century after Tori Busshi and Shotoku Taishi. He is 
Giogi, called for his marvellous wisdom, " Bosatsu " or Bodhisattwa. 
Not only was he an artist, but a great prelate, and a great statesman 
and adviser of the Japanese emperors. Fortunately, too, we have his 
portrait statue in wood, the work of his own hand, which, in spite of 
its crumbling paint, reveals the same splendid plastic use of drapery 
that we find in his Yakushi. The portrait is to be found in Saidaiji, 
north of Yakushiji. 

In order to understand how these brief periods of Wado and 
Yoro really contain the first aesthetic flowering of the Japanese race, we 
must remember that a great activity in literary form accompanied 
these triumphs of sculpture. At this time lived the two supreme 
masters of early Japanese poetry, Hitomaro and Akahito. The 
Manyoshiu, the first great Japanese anthology, began as a private 
collection in the family of Yakamochi Otomo, grew by accretion and 
was published, probably between 750 and 760 A.D. The Kojiki, a 
reduction from traditions of the religious annals of Japan, was com- 
pleted in 712. The first critical history of Japan as a whole, the 
Nihonji, was printed in 720. It was a wonderful outburst of intellect 
and refined feeling, on its literary side almost pure Japanese, and 
unrelated to the great contemporary Chinese literary outburst of 
Tang. That is, Chinese ideals had not yet penetrated Japanese 
literature, as they had Japanese Buddhist art. 

To add new evidence of how this illumination worked toward 
perfect and original art, especially bronze, we must point to the 
Kagenkei, that wonderful hanging bronze drum, whicn is one of the 
treasures of the Shinto temple at Kasuga. It is a circular bronze 
drum suspended between the interlaced bodies of two dragons, which 
twine upward from a stem which rests upon a lotos saddle on the 



ioo EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

back of a crouching dog-like figure, probably a Buddhist lion. The 
modelling is all as vigorous and rich as a Benvenuto Cellini, with- 
out any of his rococo exuberance. In restraint it is more like the 
Mercury of John of Bologna. These are typical dragons of Tang ; 
and the working out of their scaly folds and of fanciful reptilian 
legs is as realistic as if it had been mastered in long study at a 
zoological garden. The concentric relief bands of the drum, covered 
with rich scroll work, and its fine lotos centre recall the moonstones 
of Ceylon and their antecedents in Mesopotamia. 

But it should not be supposed that the aesthetic triumphs of 
this day are confined to sculpture in bronze. Several other substances 
lent themselves readily to the plastic genius of Japan, foremost being 
the medium of clay, which had been used in various forms and 
textures in China, in Khotan, in Ghandara, in Baktria, in Tanagra, 
and in Nineveh. This Japanese clay is of a beautiful light silvery- 
grey, unbaked, composed of sifted Nara earth mixed with finely 
shredded paper fibre. It yields with ease to the thumb, takes a 
polished surface that hardens with mere drying, and resists ordinary 
atmospheric disintegration. 

A large number of statuettes in this new material invented 
apparently for the very purpose of introducing the Greco-Buddhist 
forms, and based upon such importations as the Udzumasa Buddha 
are found in several striking groups set with modelled landscape 
background in the lowest story of the Horiuji pagoda. Here are 
little Greco top-knotted angels sitting about, and Bodhisattwa mingled 
with kings, saints and mediaeval monks. The Nirvana scene, among 
others, is thus worked out into detail ; many of these clay figures 
of priests in deep sorrow being naive and even comic, but fine in 
action. The last is especially true of the man who throws himself 
over backwards. These groups are probably early, and may date from 
the very rebuilding of Horiuji. 

Another and more striking set are the " 1 2 generals " accompanying 
Yakushi, life-sized statues which were originally set about the great 
circular clay altar of Shin Yakushiji at Nara. These are 12 militant 
figures in violent attitudes, some of them with spears, some with 
swords, and some arrows. Their costume seems based upon the 
primitive Khotan Bisjamons, with variations undoubtedly Chinese. 
Here too must lie great play of Japanese fancy, for no two attitudes 




THE "KAGENKEI," OR HANGING BRONZE DRUM, 
at the Shinto Temple of Kasuga, Nara. 



. 

' 




A MASS OF BROKEN STATUES AND INTERESTING REFUSE, 
such as was found by Professor Fenollosa in 
the year 1880, at Shbdaiji. 



LIB 

OF THF 
UNIVERSITY OF 



GRECO-BUDDHIST ART IN JAPAN 101 

are in the least alike. The finest is probably the figure with the 
long upraised arm. This temple was restored at the expense of 
the Japanese Government several years ago, so that it is specially 
interesting now to see the photographs taken in the early 'eighties 
with the dim figures of gigantic Bodhisattwas looming up under the 
dark apexed space of the octagonal pavilion. 

Still finer in modelling and preservation are the four life-sized 
guardians (Shi Ten O or "Four Deva Kings") which are set upon 
the great raised altar of the Kaidando (Baptistery) of Todaiji in 
Nara. So vigorous is their action that they seem almost veritable 
photographs of scowling Chinese knights in armour. So fine is their 
modelling that the effect is given of perfect marble sculpture. The 
hands have been broken and restored, and what they hold is modern. 
But the faces, bodies and hair are nearly perfect. Especially fine 
is the action of the figure which holds up a pagoda in his raised 
right palm ; and his Greco top-knot is striking. Another has his 
head completely covered in a fine Chinese helmet. All these figures 
stand upon the bodies of misshapen brutal imps, the very ideal of 
what our " theosophists " call an "elemental." It is probable that 
in these fine statues we have very close approximation to Chinese 
originals ; and we can therefore feel that we are in them virtually 
studying the art of early Tang. 

Another single statue of the violent type is the Mace thrower 
Shikkougo-Shin, a kind of Buddhist Thor kept in the adjunct 
pavilion of Sangetsudo in the grounds of Todaiji. This shows the 
utmost passion of battle in the face. The muscles and tendons of 
the arms and of the elevated fists are worked to the utmost per- 
fection of the veins. The lines of the flying drapery, though 
somewhat broken, are so fine that we are inclined to place this as 
contemporary with the culminating black bronze Trinity of Yakushiji, 
and to conjecture that it may be the work of Giogi himself. The 
original painting over the clay has been almost perfectly preserved, 
giving detailed textures and patterns the damascening of the gorget 
the scales of the waist piece, and the brocade arabesques of the close- 
fitting shirt. 

But the finest pieces that have come down to us, doubtless also the 
work of the culminating periods Wado and Yoro, are the large, 
even sometimes colossal, Bodhisattwa in clay ; especially the two 



102 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

large figures with hands clasped in prayer, upon the great altar c 
Sangetsudo. If one has been sceptical of any real Greek influenc 
up to this point, he will be converted on beholding these so-calle 
statues of Brahma and Indra (Bonten and Taishaku). This i 
probably a misnomer ; for the figures are the most feminine of a 
early sculpture, feminine in the sense of grand solid proportions tha 
bring them into a sort of rivalry with the Parthenon torsos an 
the Venus of Milo. Of course we must remember, in the case c 
these as in the case of the black trinity, that the ideal is necessaril 
different from the classic, translating the suggestion of the huma 
into godlike proportion, rather than reducing the godlike to th 
typical human. Nevertheless, the deep modelled drapery folds seer 
as fine as the best of archaic Greek, and the low relief of th 
knotted girdle is as delicate as the angels of the screen trinity 
The faces, too, have the sweet nobility of the little Bodhisattwa i; 
that statuette group, the profiles being especially beautiful. W 
must rank these as the finest work of the day along with the Yakushij 
colossi. 

We come now to the great age of Nara, which the Japanes 
vaguely identify by the period name Tempei. But the age begins ye 
earlier than Tempei, with the accession of the Emperor Shomu in 724 
who was destined to rule till his death in 748, which is also the las 
year of Tempei proper. We should better designate this as the age o 
Shomu ; but it is something of a mistake to regard it as an asstheti 
culmination. No doubt it was Japan's first age of really imperia 
splendour : Shomu's new capital, Nara, covering some thirty-five squar< 
miles and having more than a million people. Shomu himself was thi 
nearest to an imperial autocrat that Japan ever saw. He was supremi 
king, general, judge, and priest in one. Moreover, his reign was con 
temporary with the central part of that romantic Chinese reign o 
Genso (713-756) which is the real absolute culmination of Chines* 
genius. It was followed by the great decay of life and ideals under th< 
Emperor Kobun. Why, then, should we not regard it, as writers hav< 
generally done, to be the first flowering age of Japanese genius also ? 

The difference in the cases of China and Japan between Gensc 
and Shomu is that the former was formulating and organizing new 
forces from within, already superseding the somewhat alien Greco- 
Buddhism with stronger nation growths ; but that the latter had nc 




THE SANGETSUDO 
at Todaiji. 



MACE-THRDWER " 



OF 




LARGE CLAY FIGURE OF A BODHISATTWA, 
SOMETIMES CALLED " BONTEN." 
Temple of Sangetsudo. 



OF THE 
UN ,VEKSTY Of 



GRECO-BUDDHIST ART IN JAPAN 103 

new elements from within to incorporate, and became partially cut off 
from that new Central China of Tang which might have supplied new 
motive. Hence, Shomu, who at once removed the national capital to 
Nara, thought only of gathering up and enjoying the fruits of previous 
contact with the continent. In his early years he abolished the practice, 
begun by Tenchi, of sending Japanese students to study abroad. The 
new literature had already given Japan a kind of self-consciousness. 
China was herself partially divided between Buddhist and Confucian 
camps. Shomu determined to reign in independent splendour as the 
sole great Buddhist potentate of his day. His superstitious reign 
reminds us somewhat of the early Chinese Emperor Butei of Liang. 

Moreover, inspiration was already succumbing to splendour and the 
temptations of imperial favour. The demoralization of Koken was 
already beginning. The great poet Hitomaro died during the first year 
of Shomu. The great artist Giogi had passed away. The nation was 
rather cut off from a new supply of Chinese and Corean genius. Even 
its Buddhist principles were not deeply and soundly enough rooted. 
Culture was based rather on sentiment than on character. The young 
Japanese nation could not know that luxury and success were really 
the greatest enemies of supreme art. Yet the undermining forces did 
not clearly reveal themselves during Shomu's earlier years. 

The use of clay, as an alternative medium for sculpture with bronze, 
apparently did not last late into Shomu's reign. A new and purely 
Japanese substitute for it was now invented, whose greater tenacity and 
lighter weight made it possible to build and move really colossal statues 
from place to place. This was a method of hollow sculpture worked in a 
kind of lacquer composition. A high wooden frame was first covered with 
planes of coarse cloth soaked in glue, which could be made to harden into 
the primary blocking of the statue. Over this was modelled by thumb 
and spatula successive layers, progressively refined in texture, of a mixture 
of lacquer juice with powdered bark. This could be made in the lower 
contours as thin as paper, but deepened for the relief portions. The 
lacquer dried to the hardness of rock, and could be finished in shining 
black, gold leaf, or heavy oil paint. When finished, a life-size statue 
weighed only a few pounds. This seems to have been the favourite 
substance for artists, especially during the earlier years of Shomu. Its 
danger lay in making the core of wooden supports too stiff to bring out 
all the graces of action ; but this defect hardly appeared at first. Several 



io 4 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

hundred statues in this form, large and small, whole or in fragmer 
still remain in the great temples about Nara, especially in Horii 
Sangatsudo, Akishino, and Kofukuji. The Dembodo pavilion of Hori 
is largely filled with such, mostly in gilt finish. The others are mos 
painted. The guardian Kings of Sangatsudo and some of the ^ 
Bodhisattwa are eighteen feet in height. 

One of the most beautifully modelled, hardly inferior to the clay " Indr 
yet showing the Shomu modification of the Greco-Buddhist top-knot 
locks that play loose about the domed excrescence, is the seated Bodhisatt 
owned by the Art School in Tokio. Here the pure plastic of the thumb: 
is only surpassed by the Chinese indigenous clay Buddha. The somew 
bronzy stiffness of finish 'that still lingers in the Japanese clay pieces 
here thrown away. But the very facility of execution leads to a cert 
picturesque carelessness in the composition. 

The Dembodo statues are mostly in gilded trinities, and a little sma] 
than life. The best set of these has a grace and finish almost worthy 
Giogi and his black bronzes. The top-knot breaks with a special catch 
the centre part. In the Bodhisattwa, whose top-knot and left arm are brok 
the beautiful plastic play of the drapery over the shoulder give us i 
feeling of a Roman emperor's portrait statue. Since the day in 1880 wl 
I first discovered it, I have always affectionately called it " Caesar." 1 
slim painted composition statues upon the altar of the Chukondo at Kofuk 
in Nara, are of the generals of Yakushi and of priests. The brofc 
statues already illustrated are of this series. Their faces have a sir 
boyish Indian look which gives them a naive charm. Tradition has it t 
their modeller was an Indian priest who came directly to the world's n 
Buddhist Constantine, Shomu, rather than to China. The finest pries 
statue with the small Indian head is probably his self portrait. 

To this early Shomu age, say of 724 to 740, belongs also the r 
humorous bronze group of two priests, one praying, and one walki 
slowly and sanctimoniously with a censer. The drapery is of the vi 
finest cast and modelling. 

But the true Japanese substance as it was also the leading Chim 
substance for Buddhist statues, and especially for those of Shorn 
later days, was undoubtedly wood. We find wood used only exceptic 
ally and chiefly for the rare eleven-headed Kwannons, in the Suil 
Yomei, and Seimei eras (593 to 667). In the following reigns, inch 
ing the Empresses Gemmei of Wado and Gensei of Yoro, wood remain 










SEATED LACQUER FIGURE. 

Now in the Tokio Fine Arts School. 



&n 
OF 










SEATED LACQUER FIGURE. 

Now in the Tokio Fine Arts School. 



OF THE 
UNIVERSITY Of 



GRECO-BUDDHIST ART IN JAPAN 105 

quite subordinated to bronze and clay. But by the early years of 
Shomu's reign, the eleven-headed Kwannon was promoted to stand 
among the chief of Nara's deities ; and for it the retained material of 
wood was carved with all the new grace of Giogi himself. Here, too, 
the feminine attributes of this favourite, almost one might say the 
motherly quality ot her corresponding on the one side to the fecundity 
of the Ephesian Diana, on the other to the mediaeval Virgin of 
Europe became more strongly marked than in any Buddhist statue 
outside of India. 

The earliest, most beautiful, and most Greek of these wooden 
Juichimans is the sumptuously-modelled figure of the Itsushi Island, in 
Lake Biwa. Here the chief face is most sweet and beautiful, the figure 
splendidly swaying, the contours of the upper nude body suggesting 
rather than realizing the female bosom, the action of the hand in hold- 
ing the large bottle fine. The profile is equally splendid, showing traces 
of the antique depression of the thorax. All the drapery lines are as 
graceful as the finest bronzes. This is the finest wooden statue, and 
may possibly belong to the Yoro epoch. 

Later in Shomu's career, when he had become quite absorbed in temple 
erections, his young wife, the Empress Komio, said to be the most 
beautiful woman of Japan, entered into his enthusiasm, and is said at 
times to have become possessed by the spirit of the eleven-headed 
Kwannon, her person at such moments of inspiration glowing like gold. 
Other tradition has it that she used this alleged piety as a cloak for 
scandalous intimacy with one of Shomu's priests. It is generally believed 
that she allowed her unveiled person to be used as a model for a 
Juichiman Kwannon, which is generally identified with the statue of 
Hokkuji, that evidently belongs to Shomu's middle or later period. 
But this, though it has much effeminate grace and unique fancy in the 
draperies that engulf the legs as in a whirlwind, does not seem quite 
feminine or beautiful enough to have been made from the alleged model. 
The Lake Biwa Kwannon, though the most feminine, would seem to 
be too early for this episode. Somewhat less feminine, though almost 
equally beautiful, is the eleven-headed Kwannon of the Toindo at 
Yakushiji, which formerly occupied a niche at the side of the big 
Corean bronze. The white priming of this gives the impression of 
marble. The figure is so light and graceful, almost seeming to poise 
against wind currents, that I have sometimes likened it to the most 

VOL. I. K 



106 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

graceful tall French Gothic statues upon the facades of Amiens and 
Rheims. Indeed, this Japanese naturalization of far-away Greek types 
so parallels the mediaeval unconsciousness of the classic tradition that 
remotely conditioned its work, as to justify us in adopting for this 
style, if not for the Greco-Buddhist art as a whole, " the Buddhist 
Gothic." Mr. Cram has independently noted this parallelism in this 
suggestive term. 

But the wooden sculpture of Shomu was far from being limited 
to such graceful feminine forms as Juichimans. Buddhas, Bodhisattwas, 
Deva kings, priests, knights of Yakushiji's, elementals, and a dozen 
other forms, sought to realise plastic beauty under the carver's tool. 
As the reign passes towards its close, these forms grow stouter and 
heavier, a proportion that, for male figures especially, is not without 
ts dignity. These are found everywhere in temples throughout 
Yamato province, the most notable being in temples erected or 
re-dedicated in Shomu's own Tempei, many of them being in a half- 
ruinous condition. As temples fell or were burned, those statues, 
or parts of them, which could be saved were transferred to neigh- 
bouring sites. In this way we find some splendid heavy, semi-Greek 
male figures in Todaiji, Shodaiji, Yakushiji, and Akishino. The Kondo 
of Shodaiji is almost filled with them knights, Indras, and Buddhas. 
The sweetly stooping Bodhisattwa of Art at Akishino is a specially 
well-preserved example. But to get a conception of the masses of 
remains of such statues, it is necessary to see the photograph which 
I took in 1882 of the rubbish heaps at the back of the Chukondo 
altar, and the Tokondo also, at Kofukuji. Here the broken " bones " 
of composition statues mingle with splendid contours of Buddha torsoes 
or the armour of knights. It is possible that what remains to us 
to-day is only a very small percentage of what once existed. 

Here is perhaps the place to say a word upon the nature of the 
Bodhisattwa in general as worshipped in this early Nara Buddhism, 
and of its special adaptability for sculpturesque types. The general 
Buddhist idea of a Bodhisattwa is of a being who has advanced so 
far in the scale of wisdom and insight, and the renunciation of fleshly 
ties, as to be just on the point of entrance into Nirvana and salva- 
tion. Spoken of human beings, it means their last earthly incarnation. 
But it comes to have a much more special sense in Northern 
Buddhism : namely, a being who, though having the right to enter 




a a 
= 

a! 



9 

a 
H 



OF THE 
UNIVERSITY OF 






GRECO-BUDDHIST ART IN JAPAN 107 

Nirvana, deliberately renounces it, electing to work under the conditions 
and possibly renewed temptations of the world, for the love of one's 
fellow-man or of the whole sentient world. It thus denotes a new 
kind of renunciation, the renunciation of renunciation, or rather the 
renunciation of salvation. In so doing it ceases to be negative and 
self-seeking, entering upon a positive and masterful path of love and 
help. The Bodhisattwa vow in Northern Buddhism, especially in the 
Tendai sect, as we shall see in the next chapter, is a vow made as 
early as baptism to lead the strenuous path of battling for the right, 
to consecrate one's career throughout any number of necessary incar- 
nations to loving service. The Bodhisattwa idea, therefore, comes 
very near to the Christ idea. 

Now if a soul should, not rising in evolutional course from 
man, but descending in special dispensation from a paradise already 
attained, devote itself to such loving service without the need of more 
than occasional incarnation, it would become a Bodhisattwa of a higher 
type, still more Christlike a perpetual Bodhisattwa, so to speak a 
great spirit making for love and righteousness, invisible to man, bu' 
assisting him, whose answer to man's prayer comes with every 
accelerating throb of human devotion. Such a Bodhisattwa would become 
worshipped as a sort of personification of the great moral or spiritual 
principle for which he specially stood. Such a Bodhisattwa would be 
Aizu, the spirit of love ; Bisjamon, the spirit of courage ; Jizo, the 
spirit of pity, particularly of care for little children ; Manju, the 
Bodhisattwa of wisdom, or spiritual interpretation ; Kwannon, the 
Bodhisattwa of providence, sustenance, and salvation from physical 
evil. So there are Bodhisattwas of fortitude, piety, church organiza- 
tion, faith, domestic peace, and, as we have just seen, of beauty and 
art. The simple attitude of the Suiko and Nara congregations may 
be said to have regarded these virtues and graces, not as ethical 
abstractions in their souls, but as living and gracious spiritual presences, 
with just personality enough to pray to. It is the idyllic deification 
of all the good in man and society. 

Now to have turned this Pantheon of gods into an equally gracious 
group of aesthetic types was just the kind of achievement that a great 
fresh sculptural genius would be adequate for. Their semi-personality 
made adaptable the Greco - Buddhist degree of achievement in per- 
sonal realism ; while their vast generalization into moral types could utilise 

K 2 



io8 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

to the full the formal, preter-human beauty of sculptural conventions. 
For such Bodhisattwa, abstractions named with worship, such gifted 
sculpture as the triumphs of Yoro seems to offer an utterly sympathetic 
form. These lofty serene presences in bronze, clay, and wood seem 
themselves to be just the very personification of great principles that 
make for righteousness. We shall see, in later chapters, how the 
Bodhisattwa idea undergoes change or evolution toward new forms, which 
equally well relate themselves to new arts. 

The latter days of Shomu's art carried the tendency toward heaviness 
and coarseness to a much greater degree. It would seem as if the 
drying up of spiritual grace reduced to gradual insipidity aesthetic grace. 
The order of 741 to build temples and found monasteries and Buddhist 
colleges in every province of the empire, required hasty work to fulfil. 
The great Chinese and Corean models became lost in the copying of 
copies. As, in the decay of Roman art, the loss of spacing and fine 
rhythms was not perceived. The standard of taste itself had become 
perverted. 

The growing stiffness and materiality are well illustrated in the large 
painted wooden Kwannon, with body, head and flame halo, which stands 
at the back of the Horiuji Kondo altar, not far from the attenuated 
Corean Kwannon. It goes through the motions of being Greco- 
Buddhist, but its graces and rhythms are hard and unimaginative. It 
falls below the art of Yoro much as Syrian Greek falls below Attic. 
Another phase of this decaying art is the grotesques. These are 
exemplified in the Shi Ten O of Nanzendo at Kofukuji. Their clever 
attitudes suggest the pompous energy of small conceited men. Their 
bodies have now become so thick that the neck has disappeared within 
the collar of the gorget. Still another and charming phase is given in 
the sacred masks, mostly from the Kasuga collection, which mingle 
prehistoric Shinto types, related to Alaskan and Philippine dance 
masks, with Indian and Bodhisattwa types. Here are Greek comic 
masks, side by side with the bird-snouts and the long-nosed murder 
types of Pacific art. But the skill of their carving is the skill of 
Tempei. And the much later masks of the No comedies are only 
weakened adaptations of suggestions from these. 

Still another phase of the late Tempei sculpture is the realistic 
representation of child life and female life, whether dignified as Buddhist 
forms or as mere portraits. For example, the little over-elaborate and 




PANEL FROM THE GREAT BRONZE LANTERN IN FRONT OF 
THE DAI BUTSU TEMPLE AT NARA. 



OF 



GRECO-BUDDHIST ART IN JAPAN 109 

heavily bejewelled statues which the learned editor of Shimbi Taikwan 
calls "Soi, the Indian goddess of Fortune," are manifestly modelled 
after little fat Japanese girls, with one of the coiffures of the day, 
the long hair falling over the shoulders in thick locks. These are 
coloured like nature. And there are corresponding paintings of " Soi " 
with flesh half-modelled, as in European and our supposed Khotan 
art. Other paintings, more Buddhistic but not the least Greco- 
Buddhist, show probably a mixture of Chinese and Corean traits. 
These are only hair outlines, but all the drapery falls into hard, 
wiry, formal curves, of no force and little beauty, which attract the 
eye with a gaudiness of colour and minute patterns of colour on 
colour which are much like the painted patterns on the clay Kongoji 
and the colossal composition pieces of Sangatsudo. Between these fall 
the drawings of the ladies upon the few screens that remain in 
Shosoin. These have eyes near together, as in the Buddhist fat types, 
but hair falling over the head in great bags, as in the sculptured 
" Soi's." Other fine portrait statues of this day are those of priests, 
as of Ganshin Washo, the founder of Shodaiji, who is there worshipped. 

One of the last great acts of Shomu, two years before his death, 
was to decree and start the erection of a colossal bronze statue of 
Roshara Buddha (the Buddha of Light), to be placed in a great 
monastery erected on the plateau east of Nara, and at the foot of 
Mikasa mountain. This was to be called " Todaiji," the Eastern great 
monastery, or, as the Japanese and foreigners have always called it, 
" The Daibutsu." Shomu died in 748 four years before its com- 
pletion, but the plans were his. The enormous building of the 
Kondo, some 300 feet long and more than roo feet in height, has 
been partly reproduced in the present middle-age building erected 
after a destructive fire. The image itself sat 53 feet high upon its 
throne. Its present ugly big head replaces the original which was 
melted off in the fire. . But even judging from the small model, 
which remains, the figure was ugly enough at first. It apparently was 
not only the inherent difficulty of designing for such an unheard-of 
scale, and for such difficult construction, but the very taste of the day 
was for fat and neckless types. Here both sources of monstrosity were 
present. 

But one really beautiful piece of work accompanied the building 
and the solid casting of the Buddha, and that is the large bronze 



i io EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

lantern which, some 20 feet in height, stands in front of the main 
entrance to the Daibutsu-Kondo. The pedestal is of granite ; the 
lantern itself a great octagonal birdcage of open-work cast bronze. 
Upon the four unbroken panels stand in low relief the overloaded 
but not ungracious figures of Bodhisattwa. Upon the four groups 
of opening door panels fly downwards in clouds lion-like animals that 
rise into relief like the so-called " sea-horses " of the Chinese grape 
mirrors. We can hardly judge, after twelve hundred years of exposure 
to weather, of the original finish of this unique bronze. 

The whole wealth of a great and growing Empire had literally 
been cast by Shomu into this proud creation of a colossus. For it 
special taxes from provinces a thousand miles away and recently 
wrested from the Ainus, now for the first time smiling with harvests, 
had been collected, and stores of copper and gold from Japan and 
Corea had been amassed in monasteries. Shomu was really master of 
great works like an Egyptian Pharaoh. But one other big thing he 
did before he died, and on his death-bed the biggest thing of its 
kind that any human being has ever done he left by will the total 
material contents of his palace at the time of his death as a present 
to the new Buddha, and ordered to be erected a special storehouse 
within the monastery grounds for the custody of these articles. 

That storehouse is the famous Shosoin of Nara, erected in 749 
and still existing ; and the articles now therein are by far the larger 
part of the deposits of that year, as can be seen by comparison of 
the original inventory. It is the greatest place of its kind in the 
world, a unique domestic museum ; the only competitor being the 
combination of Pompeii itselt with the unearthed Roman treasures 
stored in the Naples museum. But there the articles are only those 
that could defy damp and heat stone, metal, earthenware, and frescoed 
plaster. Whereas in Shosoin every kind of article is represented, 
however perishable : writing paper in rolls from Shomu's own desk, 
garments of every grade from his wardrobe, the perishable furs and 
frail feather slippers of the Empress ; jewels ad libitum, including 
infinite variety of stone and glass beads ; all the utensils of house- 
keeping, pans for cooking, bowls for eating, spoons and knives and 
forks, yes, and glass finger bowls ; bedsteads and couches, and vases 
and boxes, and cabinets, and floss silk for embroidery, and accoutrement 
for horses, and court banners, and rare manuscripts, and painted 






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GRECO-BUDDHIST ART IN JAPAN in 

screens, and metal mirrors, and musical instruments, and weapons of 
war, and a thousand other articles of unique interest. Nowhere else 
exists such an opportunity for studying the daily life and art of a 
vanished civilization. Through it we know more of Nara life, and 
reflected in it of Chinese life in early Tang, than most of us know 
even of the China and Japan of to-day. 

The Japanese are right to prize it as something sacred, for it has 
been held as a kind of mystic legacy from Emperor to Emperor 
since the day of its founding. Never has there been an era in the 
imperial household when three commissioners with three sets of keys 
have not been appointed its official custodians. It is true that in the 
distractions and imperial poverty of the middle ages there were times 
when the museum was not opened for many years, once during the 
gap of a century. At that time storms and damp broke through 
one part of the roof, and a portion of the perishable articles, un- 
fortunately all but three or four of some 200 screens, then mouldered 
away. But two out of three partitions remained intact with all their 
contents. Very little has been added from age to age ; we have many 
successive inventories to compare with the original. When the new 
government came in with 1868 the exploration of this place became 
an unparalleled piece of romantic work. Mr. Uchida, the chief 
commissioner, made the first archaeological study of its contents and 
constructed the present system of museum shelves and glass cases, in 
which samples of all species of articles can be exhibited to those few 
who have the favour of a visit. Nowadays the museum is opened 
only once a year, for drying, and an imperial rescript is necessary for 
each visitor admitted.* Some drawings were made by antiquaries in 
the early nineteenth century, and a few such photographs were taken 
for the government exhibit at the French Exposition in 1898. A 
few copies are in the museum at Tokio and the imperial archives. 
But for the most part the contents remain still unillustrated. As 
imperial commissioner I had a chance to study these treasures on 
three separate occasions in the 'eighties. And the little I can say 
here is taken from my note-books of those years. 

The value of the collection as a whole is perhaps more archasologic 
than aesthetic ; nevertheless a vast number of specimens of high 
artistic beauty and importance are included, some of which I have 
* This rigidity was afterwards considerably relaxed. THE ED. 



ii2 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

already described. What I shall now add refers mostly to these. Facts 
of mere social interest as for example that there are no chopsticks 
in Shosoin, only spoons and forks ; and that stirrups and locks are 
quite like European cannot be dwelt upon. 

The building itself is some 100 feet long, two storeys in height, and 
raised 20 feet into the air on heavy open piling, which allows no damp 
to arise from the ground. The unpainted wood of enormous trunks, in 
being eaten with the slow oxidation of a millennium some three inches, 
exhibits exposed surfaces of the toughness of iron. It is a more precious 
privilege to climb about its rickety stairways than to ascend to the 
dome of St. Peter's. 

The first impression one gets is of being in a second resurrected Rome, 
of the continental scale of an Asia. Apparently the whole range of the 
massive continent had poured its treasures into the lap of Nara : Babylon 
and the Persia of the Sassanids, and India and Ghandara, and Annam, and 
the Amoor, and of course China and Corea, all contributing substantial 
quota. In how far these waifs are Chinese is a matter of growing interest. 
Mr. Uchida and the archaeologist of 1868 were inclined to regard them 
and most of the Horiuji articles (Horiuji was found to be almost a second 
Shosoin) as Japanese products. But we can now be sure that much of 
Shomu's prized furniture was made up of gifts from continental sovereigns 
or from unique importation. The beautiful glass and enamels came from 
Persia and China. The glazed tableware pieces yes, plates and cups and 
bowls of a mottled yellow and green, in a kind of Castile soap pattern 
abound by the gross. Not a piece like this ware exists so far as I know 
in any other Japanese or foreign collection of pottery ; so it is hard to 
place. But it is probably Chinese of early Tang, based on the relics and 
colours of Han pottery and glazes. 

Other Chinese pieces of unique value are the biwas, or pear-shaped 
lutes, across whose surface under the striking point of the strings painted 
leather panels have been glued. The sunrise landscape elephant is one of 
these. Another is the scene of lion hunting among the mountains. Still 
other biwa are inlaid with delicate flower arabesques and birds of tinted 
ivory. Lacquered boxes and other utensils inlaid with Chinese patterns in 
pearl and ivory are common. We have already noted one Tang ornamental 
piece with Taoist figures in a bamboo garden. And other remarkable 
pieces are small slabs of marble, possibly tent weights, heavily carved with 
fights between animals. The one here shown of a wild boar and a kind of 




PAINTINGS ON THE BACK OF MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS CALLED " BI\VA.' 



Of 



GRECO-BUDDHIST ART IN JAPAN 113 

hound is taken from a rude drawing in white made in the early i9th 
century. This must be Chinese Greco-Buddhist modelling of early 
Tang, as powerful and perfect as Egyptian animals of the old empire, or 
even as Greek. Still other pieces are beautiful silver boxes and vases, 
ornamented partly in relief, partly with patterns incised in the Greek 
manner. Some of the shapes are so delicate as to recall Mohammedan 
Persian art, say of coffee pots and hookahs ; and this is one ground of the 
hasty assertion that the Corean Japanese art of the Nara period is based 
upon Persian. Rather, to take a fine example the large silver pitcher 
with cover and handle ought we to say that beautiful Eastern forms like 
this, probably Chinese of early Tang, must themselves have been the 
originals from which the late Mohammedan art of Persia and India was 
derived. Sir Purdon Clarke, expert on Central Asian art, with whom I 
discussed such problems at South Kensington in 1887, agreed with me in 
Chinese attribution. 

To analyse the present specimen we should have to say that its 
shape is a refinement of Han bronzes and pottery, that its cover is 
a relic of Pacific dragon modified by Babylonian drawing, and that 
the winged horse so beautifully engraved on its side is an exquisite 
specimen of Greco-Buddhist art. This horse I have myself traced 
from an early Japanese drawing. We have already seen winged horses 
in the Han reliefs, but these were strenuous and massive in their 
lines. Here the wings are as European as those of the painted cherub 
baldachi at Yakushiji. If not Greco-Buddhist, it must be Greek art 
coming at this day by sea through Persian sources. 

Another Persian controversy concerns the flower ornamentation of 
the inlaid biwas. Here we have daintily carved pomegranate-like leaves 
for all the world like those of modern Persian carpets and Indian shawls. 
Mohammedan influence, one might allege ; yes, but too late in the day, 
for the Arabs were still concerned with Egypt and Spain, and the 
Sassanid dynasty of Persia did not fall before 637 A.D. Plenty of 
Sassanid ornament there is in Shosoin and Horiuji, especially in the 
patterns of Buddhist stuffs. But it is all, as we should expect, in the 
form of debased Assyrian combined with debased Roman. Such 
Sassanian art is well represented by the brass dish with concentric 
circles in the British Museum. But of the flower style of the inlaid 
biwas we have yet to prove the existence in any Mohammedan art 
before the twelfth century. 



ii4 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

But the greatest aesthetic triumph among the Shosoin pieces, and 
incidentally the most interesting controversy, is found in the hundred 
or more magnificent specimens of Chinese bronze mirrors. These 
were formerly believed to be Japanese. Some are only six inches in 
diameter, some as large as two feet. All are finished with a delicacy 
of modelled relief on the back and a satin smoothness of surface that 
match the angel screen of the trinity. Many of them are un- 
doubtedly Tang design, with scroll-work and dragons and tortoises 
exactly like the decoration of the Yukushiji bronze pedestal. The 
controversial ones are the grape vine mirrors, already twice spoken of, 
of which the Shosoin collection possesses a large number, of exactly 
the same freshness as the undoubtedly Tang examples and as the 
white snake trinity. It is incredible that thirty or forty pieces of 
Han age should have lasted in full perfection through eight centuries 
of Chinese change down to Shomu's time. The only statable hypothesis 
consistent with their Han origin is that some rare Han pieces had 
been copied and played upon with infinite variation by artists of 
Tang, or Nara, or both. It is possible that some pieces are Japanese, 
just as the angel trinity is probably Japanese. But the type is 
more absolutely Chinese than the latter, in which all the elements of 
design are pure Buddhist. Not a Buddhist symbol enters into the 
grape vine mirrors. Moreover, as I have said, not one feature of 
this elaborate workmanship has any kinship with any other Han 
design yet seen by me ; whereas in aesthetic feeling it is in close 
touch with all the more delicate phases of Greco- Buddhist art con- 
temporary with early Tang with Tang bronzes, Tang mirrors, Corean 
statues, the angel trinity, the Yakushiji pedestal, the Todaiji lantern, 
and the Yakushiji painted cherubim. 

The final phase of Nara degeneration is most interesting to trace. 
The Empress Koka, who ruled until 769, though a devout Buddhist, 
could not check palace and temple rottenness, and had no new phase 
of thought or action to substitute. The only hint of such a thing is 
the first worshipping of Confucius in 767. Confucius had been given 
posthumous nobility in China in 739. The Confucian party at the 
Tang capital, headed by the great Han, master prose writer of the 
Empire, had publicly, but in vain, denounced Buddhism. China was 
already threatening to divide against herself. If the wreck had been 
more serious in Japan history might have been changed ; as it was, the 




OUTLINE OF THE BUILDING KNOWN AS SHOSOIN. 




MIRROR FROM SHOSOIN. 



SILVER EWER SHOWING A DESIGN 
OF A WINGED HORSE. 
At Horiuji. 



Ut iuun 



GRECO-BUDDHIST ART IN JAPAN 115 

Confucian worship, only sporadic, was a sign of returning intercourse 
with China. For in almost the same year the Empress created her 
Buddhist prime minister " King of Religion." The laws of Taiho, 
guaranteeing the land to the people, were falling into disuse ; no re- 
apportioning and re-appraising were ordered, and the selfish nobles 
confiscated where they could. Such demoralization could end only in 
disaster. 

The art of the day shows the change : the bronze wooden statues 
of Dembodo, without a real organic rhythm, all stiff as a board, 
being typical Koken art. A last good phase is seen in the ugly 
and awkward low-relief " generals " of the Tokando of Kofukuji. 
Then follow the unspeakable atrocities of the large bronze Shi Ten 
O of Saidaiji. 

A ray of light comes from attempts at painting ; many of these 
are fat and roly-poly, and of a misplaced gorgeousness. Yet there 
is an attempt to introduce low relief in Amida's Western Heaven, 
with its bands of trinities and angels. The woven colossal Paradise 
of Taimadera belongs to this day, as also the statue of the imperial 
nun Chujo-hime, who was translated at her death to Heaven. Thus 
to this day persists the Bodhisattwa club among the young men of 
the village, who once a year dress as Amida, Kwannon, and the 
twenty-five Bosatsu, build a great bridge over the court of Taima, 
and cross with elaborate dancing to carry the statuette of Chujo-hime 
to Heaven. A true relic of the Buddhist miracle dance is this, 
which I saw in 1888, analogue of the Oberammergau performances 
in Christian Europe. The Bodhisattwa masks are late beautiful 
examples of Koken carving. The successor, Korin, did no better 
for her few years ; and the whole fate of Japan lay with the power 
to do new things of Kwammu, who succeeded to the throne in 
782. Such is our brief account of the rise and fall of Greco- 
Buddhist art in Japan. 



CHAPTER VII. 

MYSTICAL BUDDHIST PAINTING IN CHINA AND 

JAPAN. 

Eighth Century to Eleventh. 
Loyang and Kioto. 

IT would be a decided mistake to suppose that Greco-Buddhist art 
served as more than a single short step in the climb of Chinese 
genius toward its apex. It was a mere interlude in the perpetual 
overlaying of the faith in China with form after form. It helped the 
subsequent art, no doubt, by its training in proportion and in fine line 
rhythms. But as a special aesthetic form it was forgotten in China almost 
as soon as it had begun. We have now to see what were the real causes 
of the further advance of Chinese art to the Tang culmination. 

It must be remembered that in such a large, complex, yet loosely 
jointed mass as the Chinese Empire, great movements are rarely single, 
but overlapping with others, the germs of subsequent creation slumbering 
along for centuries side by side with their antagonists. It is thus true 
that all through the Greco-Buddhist days of the eighth century at least two 
great earlier art movements never died out one the love of pure land- 
scape in poetry and painting, which had been fostered by the long 
residence of the Chinese Court in the south, especially the Court of 
Liang ; the other an art of religious painting, which itself had subdivided 
into two main forms : a Northern or Tartar form in which the hair lines 
were quite subordinate to colour masses, and a Southern form, originated by 
Kogaishi (Ku K'ai-chih), in which the flexible brush line played a powerful 
part. Though little remains to illustrate either of these early beginnings, 
we know from written history that all received some attention during the 
formative years of early Tang. It was now, at the end of the seventh 



MYSTICAL BUDDHIST PAINTING 117 

century, new natural and spiritual forces acting widely throughout the 
nation that tended to 'bring these half-neglected aesthetic styles more into 
the foreground. 

We have seen that the root of the exceptional genius of Tang lay 
in the variety of its sources, and in their fertile reaction upon each 
other when brought into contact at a common capital. The wealth, 
too, of the empire had never before reached such height. Buildings 
were grander, stuffs and clothing more exquisite, food more plentiful, 
the people happier, engineering works more stupendous, than in the 
Han dynasty or in any preceding period of Chinese history. The 
Eastern capital, Loyang, in the ancient peaceful seats of the Hoangho 
valley, became now rebuilt upon a scale which accommodated more than 
two million people. Great public gardens and museums gave recreation 
to the people. The private palace gardens were raised on mighty walled 
terraces, pavilion crowned, that enjoyed far prospect over lakes and 
bays^-or sunk into cool shady wells where plum trees shot their scaly 
arms into the shape of dragons, and ancient pines had been trained to 
writhe like serpents through the interstices of water-worn stone. Great 
jars of hard paste pottery covered with creamy glazes, and tiles of 
deeper hue, probably purple and yellow an art descended from the 
glazed ware of the long extinct Han gave brilliancy to the landscape 
architecture. Pavilions rose above granite and marble foundations in 
rainbow tier after tier : great banquetting halls, and blue silk awnings, 
and heavy portieres shot with golden thread adding alike to the exalted 
coolness and to the aesthetic transitions. A vast commerce had opened 
up from the southern and eastern ports with the Indian Ocean and 
even the Persian Gulf. Colonies of Arab merchants already had alien 
settlements in the Chinese cities. Religious liberty was fairly respected, 
for Mohammedan mosques and Jewish synagogues, and even temples of 
Nestorian Christians, arose side by side in some of the more populous 
capitals. Indeed, in these great days of early Tang, China had become 
the metropolitan garden of Asia, surpassing the splendours of Khan or 
Caliph at Samarcand and Damascus and Bagdad. 

But beside these material advantages, the Chinese mind, and especially 
the Chinese literature, must be said also to have blossomed into 
luxurious perfection. Great scholars, Buddhist and Confucian, thronged 
the receptions of the imperial court ; the greatest hand-writers of China 
wrote mighty thoughts into exquisite manuscript ; the culmination of 



n8 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

forceful dignified prose came with the memorials of Han wei Kung 
(Kantaishi) ; and, more than all, the wonderful experiments in perfect- 
ing poetic forms which had followed the beginnings of Toemmei and 
Shareiwun in the South now came to their final blossoming in a host 
of great poets who fired the various resources of form with their fresh 
genius and unfettered taste. 

The very centre and core of this mighty illumination of Tang was 
the long reign of the Emperor Genso, who ascended the throne in 713, 
after the Greco-Buddhist inspiration had spent its course, and who out- 
lived the tremendous experiments of the Chinese soul to find perfect 
form for expression that preceded the insurrections and disasters of 755. 
Now it was that the very China of China began to take on her per- 
fected institutions. The civil service examinations were broadened and 
made compulsory as an anteroom to officialdom ; the University was 
organized, the Boards of History and Morals purified, and the tendencies 
of literature and art concentrated into that supreme achievement which 
soon gives rise to canons. 

The career of Genso (Hsuan Tsung) himself is most romantic and 
pitiful. Set at the very acme of Chinese power and feeling, his good- 
humoured weakness and, as the later Confucian scholars would say, 
superstitions and dissipations led him into intertangled nests of palace 
intrigue, and into a sort of aesthetic excess that well-nigh undermined 
not only him, but his whole dynasty. If we are to believe the purist 
censors who have denounced this age, it was almost as bad as the days 
of Nero and the mediaeval popes. But we must remember that even 
the China of this early day was already threatened with a duality that 
has since become her fate and her curse, a growing antagonism between 
the Confucian scholars and all other believers and thinkers, who entered 
with joy and hopefulness upon a new life, new religious sanctions, and 
a new art. It was a situation somewhat parallel to the split between 
Puritans and Cavaliers that had declared itself in England by the reigns 
of the first James and Charles. If Wycliff had been the prime English 
sage of ancient years who had laid down full philosophic foundations 
for British character, as Confucius had done for Chinese, and if the 
Catholic love for gaiety and drama and art and light verse had come 
as a passionate after-outreach for freedom, as the newer and newer 
waves of idealistic Buddhism flowed into China, the parallelism would 
be closer. 



MYSTICAL BUDDHIST PAINTING 119 

But we may well suspect the Puritan chroniclers of China of 
falsifying the record when they lay such deep stress upon the gap as 
already existing in Genso's day. It is as if we imagined Elizabeth and 
her Court to take their nominal Protestantism with the same seriousness 
as Cromwell and Milton. The age of Genso and the strength of its 
whole illumination lie just in the fact that the stress and joy of genius 
for the time quite drowned the muttering of the storm ; people acted 
and wrote and painted, hardly knowing or caring whether they were 
Confucians, Taoists, or Buddhists, weaving coloured threads from each 
into their splendid fabric as the fancy suited. It was, indeed, a kind 
of glorified Elizabethan age for China. 

Among the satellites at this gay Court none were more in evidence 
and more honoured than the lyric poets. Genso sent invitations far 
and wide to the hopeful geniuses of the provinces. It was as if 
Marlowe, Green, and Peale, and Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne, should 
have become the very bulwark and the intimate advisers of the 
English throne. Rank and salaries and splendid clothes they received ; 
and so highly was their real genius understood and craved that its 
prime condition freedom was allowed. Rihaku, the lyric laureate of 
China, openly lampooned the Emperor and his mistresses. He played 
on a grand scale the roystering Lovelace and the scurrilous Herrick 
to the long-faced Marvell of Kantaishi, or the passionate Vaughan 
of Omakitsu. He tried, at times, the taste of their several styles ; and 
the poetical wealth of the man and of his day is proved by the fact 
that nature, man, ethics, Taoist fancies and Buddhist devotion, all enter 
his verses as natural friends, and all pulsing with sympathy toward the 
social betterment and freedom of man. 

The great landscape poet of the day, who was also a great landscape 
painter as well as statesman, Omakitsu Oi (Wang Wei), lived in a 
beautiful villa with hillocks and lakes, a few miles from the capital. 
Here his paintings of rural scenes in fine ink monochrome were 
distributed to his friends, pictures which became the pride of later 
collectors. But he was no Confucian pedant far from it ; and the 
attempt of late and degenerate critics of the present dynasty to 
fasten upon him the narrow juiceless canon of their so-called 
" Southern School " is absurd. It is also quite untrue that black-and- 
white work began with him, and quite untrue that it was the fact 
of working in black-and-white which distinguished the " Southern," 



120 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

or " Bunjingwa " School, from the " Northern," or official. His style, 
instead of being soft and soaky and blotchy the trick of the modern 
formalists was strong and hard and scratchy, the brush strokes fall- 
ing in incredibly varied forms, as we see in his great waterfall of 
Chishakuin in Kioto,* the only important specimen of his work 
preserved in Japan, or perhaps in the world. It was the spontaneous 
literary form of Oi that led after centuries to a worn, pared-off canon 
by which he became travestied and misunderstood. 

His great friend and rival in the ink landscape school, borrowed 
from the traditions of Liang, was the otherwise celebrated artist 
Godoshi (Wu Tao-Tzu), who has left us the finest early specimens 
of Chinese monochrome landscape in the pair owned by Shinjuan 
Daitokuji in Kioto. Here, too, we can see that the very style is 
scratchy and occupied with the setting of strong, crisp masses of 
infinite variety upon sized paper or silk. The impressionism of blur 
and accident came in at a far later day with the Confucian exquisites 
of Sung (So), and especially of Yuen. I shall refer to these sporadic 
ink landscapes of Tang again when I come to consider the landscape 
art of Sung. 

It is rather to the Buddhist art, and especially the Buddhist 
painting of Tang, that we have to turn, if we are to follow our 
plan of characterizing each age by its strongest, most creative, most 
original work. The enthusiasm of Genso was all for Buddhism and 
Taoism. These elements of personal freedom play the greatest part 
in Rihaku's imagery. And it was in this line that Genso's (Hsuan- 
Tsung) greatest artist, Godoshi, achieved first a national and then a 
world-wide reputation. Let us now see how the several Buddhist 
movements lead up to the culminating art of Godoshi (Wu Tao-Tzu). 

Already we have marked how, in the Southern dynasties, the con- 
templative school of Buddhism, the Zen, founded by Daruma, had 
led to landscape art and literature, and to a more human rendering 
of sacred scenes and deities. Now this Zen movement, although it 
does not reach its creative apex until the following Sung, played 
some part in the Buddhist art of Genso. But, as we have seen, 
the Northern formal and tinted Buddhist art of Tartar tradition had 
also its part to play. Indeed, for the moment the sects half blurred 

* Modern Japanese critics are now inclined to think this waterfall a copy. THE ED. 




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MYSTICAL BUDDHIST PAINTING 121 

their outlines, so as to let in freely all tentative elements that 
might be found to have aesthetic efficacy. In brief, there is some- 
thing of a union or " pooling " of styles. 

Into this seething Buddhist mixture of the Chinese Tang capitals 
was now poured a new and powerful solvent which had come into 
China in the wake of the Greco-Buddhist art. This was the mystical 
or esoteric form of the belief, which, founded on the philosophical 
idealism of Nagajuna, Vasubandhu, and Asangpo, had incorporated 
all the mystical psychology which seems to have been a part of 
India since Vedic days, and had concentrated all these into a special 
doctrinal discipline. This had been specially introduced by an 
Indian heresiarch (?) about the year 640. By 700 it had grown into 
a dominant sect, of great piety and wealthy patronage, with its 
central sect located upon the famous Tientai mountain. Here the 
success of the Indian teacher, as the Japanese call him, Tendai 
Daishi, had set up a great school for the transmission of the 
doctrine ; and the young aristocrats of Loyang were prostrated before 
him in their efforts to realise the mystic union with divinity, a kind 
of neo - Platonic ecstasy, which he professed. This great esoteric 
sect, which ascribes magical power and direct contact with spirit 
to the human soul, was called, from its central sect, the Tendai 
sect. The mastery of self, the spiritual knighthood which it 
preached, its Bodhisattwa vow, and the higher communion of the 
saints, awakened extraordinary enthusiasm, much as a great leader of 
Theosophy might do among us if he really worked great miracles, 
really were able to identify thought and intuition, and to prove 
his system in harmony with all healthy, moral, and social move- 
ments, and only an expansion of preceding religious forms. With such 
earnestness as this the Christian Scientists seem to move among 
us to-day. 

But the mysticism of the Tendai sect went to a range of psycho- 
logical analysis which dwarfs the neo-Platonist. It assumes the 
world to be real rather than illusory ; striving, evolution : a salvation 
through process a salvation to be achieved within the body of society 
and human law a salvation of personal freedom and self-directed 
illumination a salvation by renouncing salvation for loving work. 
The opening of the inner eye to natural facts and spiritual presences 
that are veiled from lower forms is not the aim but the incident of 

VOL. I. L 



122 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

discipline. It is this, however, which gives the accompanying art its 
vivid value and piercing imagination. The power to image forth truth 
in forms of glowing vision, to see the very presences of Buddhas and 
Bodhisattwas clad with dazzling light, to project angelic groups upon 
the background of contemplation and to behold the inner circulation 
of native affinities and sympathies working in intertwisted lines of 
physical and moral law the psychologic armies of elementals working 
through storms of molecules and currents all this is of the very 
substance, not of poetry and music, but of visual art. 

How different is all this direct challenging of co-operating spirits, 
often as Mahatma or conquerors in the flesh, from the vague though 
vast moral abstractions of the exoteric sects ! There it was but the 
enhancement of a natural moral potency a vast abstraction projecting 
into a Brocken shadow against the sky traits which might not be 
highly reverenced if conceived as frankly human. Here it is the 
actual presence of spiritual hierarchy : as if the devotee were a soldier 
in the ranks privileged to see his captain and general occasionally 
pass his tent, keenly inspect, and scatter glances of encouragement. 
Man thus became, or thought he became, visible co-ruler of history, 
with superman. He could foreknow the passwords and the plan of 
campaign, and provide the restoratives of the hospital wards. It was 
vision, concrete, inspiring, personal even, rather than abstraction. The 
very electricity of these spirits could be seen pulsing through the flesh 
as through the adamant of mountains. 

And how perfectly the difference between these two visions corre- 
sponded to a broad cleavage between sister arts. The exoteric worship 
of the abstract principle needed body, yet a body as severe as itself. 
Hence sculpture and ithe satiny hardness of bronze became the natural 
mediums. But for flashing armies of light and colour, and the 
enthronement of the general, and the piercing of hell and earthly 
squalor, in short the whole normal entanglement of human function 
in social background with a skein of spiritual forces about its head, 
as the dog plays unconsciously his part in the master's milieu for 
this transfigured life-panorama only the art of painting ventures to 
be adequate. There, the very rhythms of line may suggest motion 
and transitory phases which are forbidden to sculpture. The latter 
normally registers the permanent ; the former the process. Colour, 
too, and light have endless range of suggestions, not only realistic 




FAMOUS KWANNON. By Enriuhon (Yen Li-per.) 
Mr. Charles L. Freer. 



Uiv 
Of 
UNIVERSITY Oi 



MYSTICAL BUDDHIST PAINTING 123 

backgrounds but symbolic range of expressing well-nigh inexpressible 
relations. Heretofore in these chapters we have dealt almost ex- 
clusively with the severer form ; sculpture seems to come first within the 
grasp of all religious peoples. But now we are to follow Chinese 
and Japanese art into the greater subtleties of painting, the ripe stage 
of infinite modulation in line and colour. It is not that sculpture 
will be quite absent from any age, but it will never again become 
the leader of creative forms. All this relates too to new phases of 
temple worship, the more personal seclusion of the small shrine with 
its painted insetting for an altar-piece, instead of the more public and 
more dominating statue. 

Chinese Buddhist painting comes down to us with the slim hair line, 
derived originally from sculpture, filled in with richer and richer colouring, 
until the severity of line becomes almost overlaid with the gorgeousness 
of mass. As the Tang dynasty came in and incorporated the 
Tartar style, which rather ran to decoration, the fine synthesis of 
sculptural line with pictorial colour could well begin. The great 
Tang Court painters who came before the culminating age of Genso, 
like Enriuhon, (Yen-Li-pen) and Enriutoku, doubtless practised this 
style. A type of it, which may be ascribed ultimately to Enriuhon, 
is the great seated Kwannon, shrouded in rich lace, of which we have 
dozens of replicas made during the Tang and the Sung dynasties. 
This type in Japan is usually ascribed to Godoshi ; but I believe 
that to be a mistake, quite like the mistake of ascribing, say, all 
sixteenth-century Japanese paintings to Motonobu. The one name 
we know is used to cover a multitude of styles. The largest and 
perhaps finest replica of the Enriuhon type of Kwannon is the great 
painted kakemono, ascribed to Godoshi, kept in Daitokuji. This may 
well be of Tang workmanship, though not necessarily from Enriuhon's 
own hand. A smaller example, but of very beautiful workmanship, 
probably Sung, is in Mr. Freer's collection. This I shall now 
describe, as giving a fair account, probably, of .Enriuhon's lost original. 
The figure sits on a rough rock of blue, green, and gold in a cave 
whose stalactites hang in points above her (or his) head. It is a 
grand Kwannon, the Bodhisattwa of Providence or human sustenance, 
and here, as in most Tang examples of this subject, wears a light 
moustache. This, and the fact that the Sung Kwannons are 

L 2 



124 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

markedly feminine, has led certain learned scholars to conclude that 
Avalokitesvara was primarily masculine, and that the change was due 
to a clerical error of gender in transcribing some Sanscrit or Pali term. 
How shallow this view is can be seen from the fact that other previous 
Kwannons, the Chuguji, for instance, of 620 and the eleven-headed 
Lake Biwa (?55)> are markedly feminine. The truth is that a great 
Bodhisattwa is in its own nature indeterminate as to sex, having 
risen above the distinction, or rather embodying in itself the united 
spiritual graces of both sexes. It is a matter of accident which one it 
may assume upon incarnation. It just happens that Tang thought, 
or preferred to think, of Kwannon as a great demiurge or creator, 
while Sung preferred to lay stress upon the element of motherhood. 

But let me proceed with my description. The lines are of hair 
thickness; the shirt is caught over the crossed legs in the remains 
of sculpturesque folds and openings, not unlike the Corean bronze 
type of Toindo. Tartar Buddhist art retained something of this stiff 
wiry drapery even down to Ming. But there is little of stiffness 
above. The flesh is of gold, always a feature of the Enriuhon type, 
and found thus combined with thick colouring in the costume down 
to later times in Northern work. The head is shaped differently 
from the Greco statues, being long and oval, with rather a narrow 
forehead. The head-dress is built up into an elaborate tiara of 
coloured gems and flowers. But the peculiar feature of this type is 
the enshrouding of the whole body in an elaborate lace veil, painted 
in thin tones of cream over the heavy colours, and which hangs 
from the top of the tiara. It is the hair line contour of the veil 
which gives the peculiar proportion and line system to these figures. 
There is a kind of Gothic aspiring of all the lines to the tip of 
the head. A crystal vase stands upon a jutting slab of rock on 
the right. There are two halos, both circular, and both traced only 
in a fine gold line one small, for the head ; one large, for the 
whole body. From the water at his feet grow rich corals and lotos 
buds, in a Tang style derived from Babylonian Han. But a chief 
feature of the thought, if not of the composition, is a small Chinese 
child standing upon a rock in the foreground, with hands upraised 
in prayer. The Kwannon seems graciously to bend his glance down 
to it. This doubtless typifies man's helplessness without supernatural 
guiding the reality of the primary transcendental relation. The 



MYSTICAL BUDDHIST PAINTING 125 

colours are rich reds, carmines, orange, greens and blues, heightened 
with touches of gold. There is no gold in the cream lace. 

Perhaps here were best said what we have to say once for all 
concerning the question of genuineness in ancient Chinese paintings, 
and of the importance of copies. To the collectors and the museum 
owners, in short to the whole range of the market aspect of art, 
it is a vital question whether an individual work be ascribable to 
the pen of any great master, or whether it be probably a copy of 
some later date. The market value naturally rests upon this point. 
But the aesthetic, archaeologic and historical value may be only 
slightly lessened by an uncertainty. Great masterpieces that existed 
in Tang, and before, became great models on which later masters 
of Tang and Sung formed their styles ; and, though the ripe 
personal styles of these latter might vary from these models, it was 
part of the discipline and pleasure of work to make accurate copies, 
or else transcripts with slight variation. These copies Time has so 
softened that to-day they probably appear not very unlike what the 
originals would seem if we had them, though doubtless something 
of technical beauty has been lost. Yet, in the absence of the 
originals, the aesthetic beauties and types of the copies become of 
priceless value in determining and appreciating qualities that other- 
wise would be lost for ever. 

It is quite like the state of our present knowledge of great 
Greek masterpieces of sculpture, which have mostly vanished. We 
read in Pausanias of the beauties of Scopas and Praxiteles, and the 
pictorial beauties of Polyclites' Venuses and Apollos. We know that 
these were all copied in countless replicas, some of which made their 
way to the Roman palaces and villas. In a certain sense all later 
classic art was remotely built upon the traditions of such models, just 
as our postal cards and porcelains of to-day reflect Fra Angelicos, 
Raphaels, and Bellinis. The case of Greek paintings is worse, for 
even the sketch drawings and copies have mostly vanished, and even a 
hint of the ajsthetic value of that great phase of art has to be manu- 
factured. Greek sculpture is not quite so conjectural as this, for in 
addition to the slender stock of proved originals we have the 
suggestions of a vast mass of replicas to build inferences upon. 
It is only in this way, for example, that we know the type of the 
Phidias Athene. 



126 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

Now the case of ancient Chinese painting stands at present much 
as does that of Greek masterpieces in sculpture. There are very 
few originals of whose authenticity we can have documentary proof. 
But there are a fair stock of pictures whose aesthetic excellences are so 
supreme that we can hardly imagine where the greater power of an 
original could possibly lie ; and so, as in the perfection of the Hermes 
of Praxiteles for parallel, we take this markedly individual quality as the 
very standard of the original. Such, for example, is the case with 
the Mokkei Kwannon at Daitokuji. Now, from this standard we judge 
the other claimants, identifying followers, and judging pieces that 
exhibit slightly inferior execution of sublime conceptions as probably 
replicas from this master. For, after all and this is what dis- 
tinguishes the real student of beauty in art, of the world's great types 
of beauty, from the personal pride of the mere collector the supreme 
thing in the world of art is conception. Only the greatest men can 
create the supreme types of imaginative beauty. It is the followers, 
lesser men, who approximate more or less closely to the details of 
execution. When they copy a great work of their master, a conception 
far beyond their own inspiration, there appears in their work, in spite 
of its possible shortcomings in technique, a borrowed splendour which 
far transcends the finest example of their independent creations. Thus 
a fairly adequate copy of Mokkei or Kakei is a thousand times more 
valuable for any real aesthetic study than a whole gallery full of 
Ming originals. 

And when we go back to Tang and pre-Tang, the case stands 
differently only to this extent : that we, perhaps, have no originals at 
all capable of documentary proof, and very few of which we can say, 
like the Mokkei Kwannon of Sung, that no higher aesthetic accomplish- 
ment along its special line is conceivable. Nevertheless, we have a fair 
number of pieces in which we can feel that the conception is so fine and 
the execution so high that we are face to face with at least a direct and 
close transcript of the original splendour. And such pieces, however 
overshadowed with the ultimate doubt, are of immeasurably greater 
value for the student of beauty than undoubted originals of later and 
inferior men. The case is thus not unlike that of many of the great 
Greek sculptors. When we try to translate the bare words of Pausanias 
into real images of the beauties of Scopas, Myson, and Praxiteles, we 
derive what help we may from the finest extant fragments which 



MYSTICAL BUDDHIST PAINTING 127 

seem to embody their individual traits. The case is far more hopeful 
than that of Greek painting, for there we have, in such dish-water 
copies of copies as Pompeii presents, hardly a hint of what their real 
aesthetic merit must have been. If we should unearth to-day or to- 
morrow from long-buried ruins a group of encaustics immeasurably 
superior to later Roman pictures, but without documentary evidence, 
we should esteem it an unspeakable fortune, and should devote the 
utmost effort to establish, on aesthetic grounds, the possibility that 
here we had the replica of such and such a vanished masterpiece. 
If, on the other hand, the few transcendent pieces of ancient Chinese 
painting were lost to us, we should be in the same sad state as we 
now are concerning Greek. We should never divine even a hint of 
what a glorious school of art China had once possessed. The case 
is just that of the sudden unearthing of the Greek masterpieces alas, 
hardly to be hoped for for we have unearthed dozens of supreme 
pictures which we are forced to relate back to the master conceptions 
of Tang genius. It is in this sense, then, that we shall speak of 
Enriuhon, Godoshi, Zengetsu Daishi, and Ririomin with at least as 
much right as we speak of the styles of all Greek sculptors but 
Phidias. 

We do not know whether any great Tang masterpieces yet 
remain in Chinese collections ; for an archaeological exploration of 
China cannot even be said to have begun. But Japanese critics of 
this and recent ages who have had the privilege of examining the 
collections of Peking mandarins, or of deriving traces through Peking 
dealers, assert that there is almost no probability of finding such 
work in that capital. It is more probable that changes of taste 
have so distorted the eye of modern China, that not a scholar of 
Peking to-day has the least power of conceiving what an original of 
Tang would be like. Modern Chinese alleged copies have about as 
much weight as if a New York dealer in American impressionists 
should mark one of these as based upon an original Giotto.* 



In Japan, at present, we may still look for hopeful traces. 
Into Japan have been imported for centuries especially at first in 

* Since this was written much has occurred in China which would have given the 
writer a different point of view. THE ED. 



i 2 8 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

the eighth and ninth centuries, later in the eleventh and twelfth, and 
still later in the fifteenth century what great masterpieces of China 
could be seized upon. It is not probable that they always got the 
supreme examples which they claimed ; yet, at the first at least of 
these periods, Japanese artists and scholars of the ripest power made 
the selections. Granting that most pieces extant in Japan came in 
with Ashikaga importation in the fifteenth century, it was as keen an 
eye as Sesshu's that passed judgment on them, Sesshu who had travelled 
for years as China's honoured guest, and been recognized by the 
Chinese Court as a greater artist than any of their contemporary 
Ming. He must have had every opportunity to distinguish the really 
great old masterpieces of China from shallow copies, just as an 
American critic can distinguish to-day between a real and a sham 
Rembrandt that a European dealer might send us. Indeed, Japan 
was then herself the successor and leader of " the Chinese school," 
and could command genuine examples. Most later Japanese tradition 
as to genuineness and attribution has been based upon the Ashikaga 
knowledge of Sesshu and his compeers, quite as Ming traditions of 
Tang had been based upon Sung criticisms. And we must remember 
that in Sesshu's day, a Sung copy would appear only 200 years old, 
whereas an early Tang copy or original would appear 700. The gap 
to his eye would be far greater than it would to ours, for after about 
400 years of age all silks, barring accidents, become of nearly 
equal tone. And just as Sesshu was able to sift the traditions 
of Sung through Ming ; and the early Kanos, Masanobu and 
Motonobu, inherited them through Sesshu ; iand Tanyu, the great 
early Tokugawa Court painter, inherited from Motonobu ; and 
Kano Isen, the great eclectic painter and critic of 1840, based his 
re-examination of the whole amount of evidence upon Tanyu ; so I, 
in humbler degree, have tried to resift the accumulation of tradition 
and fresh evidence with the critical instrument put into my hand 
by Isen's son and grandson, my personal teachers. It is in my 
opinion the Japanese line of examples and traditions therefore, rather 
than the effete and diluted Chinese, which must become the starting- 
point of European evaluation. A certain school of young Japanese 
of to-day, however who came too late to be trained by an unbroken 
line of feeling from the past, and who have almost forgotten the 
great Kanos who worked under the Shogun before 1868 seem 



MYSTICAL BUDDHIST PAINTING 129 

disposed to throw away all key of tradition and to reject all 
evidence that cannot be proved to be documentary. In this spirit 
they assert that no Tang masterpieces whatever exist, and of even 
such a recent Japanese artist as Matahei, that he never lived. But 
they make the mistake of rejecting the unrivalled documentary value 
that lives in a work of art itself. To an eye for whom supreme 
proportions and rhythms are eloquent, documents themselves that 
may be forged are far more suspicious. Those European sinologues 
who regard one Chinese inscription as good as another, unless they 
have also the keen eye for artistic individuality, are at the mercy 
of an unknown pen. It is a mistake not to build at least, how- 
ever much we may modify the superstructure, upon the foundation 
of contemporary tradition, a kind of living intellectual substance, 
that came down from Sung through Sesshu to the Japanese of 
1868. With this body of tradition thrown aside, a Japanese scholar 
to-day is as far removed from Ming, and even Kano Isen, as 
we are removed by the cataclysm of the Middle Ages from classic 
tradition. 

One more thing should be added of the copies which generations 
of later Japanese artists have made from what they deemed Chinese 
originals. In so far as these artists have been careful and skilful, 
these replicas, even with modifications, are true lines of insight into 
the past, as much so as those of the old Chinese copyists, down 
to early Ming. It is quite different with the modern Chinese 
copyists, for their taste is changed and their tradition lost. But 
the Japanese are in some sense the true custodians of the secret 
and consciously careful copies made as late as Isen and Tanshin of 
the I gth century, are of very great value. These artists had 
practically the whole range of all the daimios and temple collections, 
as we shall see in a later chapter. Further research will only 
demonstrate the fundamental truths of those bases of criticism which 
I have just laid down^ 

It is time we returned from this digression to the great period 
of Genso Kotei at Loyang. Here the great pictorial genius who 
overshadowed the world was Godoshi (Wu-Tao-Tzu), whom we have 
already noticed as a painter of landscape. Godoshi was first of all a 
great Buddhist painter, who had to find ways of expressing the new 
vast conceptions of his day. Such antique and hieratic forms even as 



130 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

the charming lace Kwannon of Enriuhon he wished to discard ; to 
become more direct, more human, more like an actual vision. For 
this he determined upon a technique which had wrapped up in it 
the whole future destiny of Oriental art. This was to go back to 
the flexible brush stroke and thick line of Kogaishi (Ku-Kai-Chih), 
expand its force, make it more flexible, more capable of passing in 
a single stroke from a solid mass to a hair line, more able to 
achieve passages of contrast between rough-edged strokes and smoother 
sleek ones. 

The power of the pen in writing had now advanced far beyond 
the southern beginnings of Ogishi (Wang Hsi-Chih) and Kogaishi. 
The Tang dynasty, and particularly the eighth century, is the very 
culmination of power and beauty in Chinese writing. It is natural 
that a similar force should pass into the line with painting. After 
all, there has never been another painter's tool in the world, brush, 
charcoal, or burin, which compares in force, ease and gradation with 
the great Chinese brush. To be sure it enwraps all painting in a 
convention the convention that the line which bounds things shall 
be visible. But no art can be free from some convention. Its 
characteristic beauties lie in the very terms of the convention. 
Convention is not an inevitable restraint which we deplore, but the 
fertile language of an invention which we joy to use. It would 
be absurd to deplore that the ecstasies of music are limited by the 
conventions of sound-relationships, nay, of the very instruments that 
produce the sound. So fresco painting thrives on its technique ; the 
beauty of perfect bronze work is inimitable in other material. So in 
oil painting, the great craftsman gets beauty by the placing of his broad 
flat strokes the brushwork is the art. And in Chinese painting of 
the grand school of Tang it is only another kind of brushwork. 
Why should painting eschew line, in order for ever to make of itself 
a kind of coloured sculpture ? It is not things that we want in art, 
but the beauty of things ; and if this beauty dwells largely in their 
line, their boundaries of space, their proportions and shapes, and the 
unity and system of the line rhythms, it is a glorious convention that 
can seize on just that and make supreme music out of it. As 
Godoshi used them, the brush lines became great " lead lines," much 
as we use them in our best stained-glass windows, making the lead 
supports carry the eye to the form elements of the composition. Only 



MYSTICAL BUDDHIST PAINTING 131 

the Godoshi lead-line is far more flexible and suave, in that it can 
thin itself out to a hair when it likes. Probably the great early Greek 
painting of Polyclites was of this sort, and line is primary in all their 
vase-painting and mosaic. It does not follow, either, that because line 
is so strong that colour and mass must necessarily be thin. Godoshi 
would fill up his interspaces, the openings between the lines, with 
strong patches of colour, relieved in deep mosaic effect one against 
another, not necessarily quite flat, but relying more for their modu- 
lation upon the turn of the line and the deepening of colour which 
supported it than upon the eternal modelling of the colour, as with 
hair-line or no-line painting. 

It may suit some of us to cast slurs upon this as a " primitive " 
method; and indeed, if "ripe" or "advanced" be defined by that 
realism which always precedes decay, it is primitive. But it is the very 
method of health. It is one of the noblest conventions of art, even if 
not the only one. For the aim of real art evolution is not to come 
nearer and nearer to a coloured photograph, but if possible to put more 
and more grandeur and refined beauty into our spaces, our porportions, 
and our systems of line rhythm. This is the very language of visual 
art, as much so as tone is of musical. Therefore there is a certain primal 
and universal energy in Godoshi's design which has hardly been sur- 
passed in the whole range of the world's art. It establishes itself side 
by side with Phidias and Michel Angelo ; not that its convention is 
just like theirs, but that its space and line ideas possess a parallel 
grandeur. It may almost be declared to be the world's supreme type in 
grandeur of delineation. And it must not fail of recognition that this 
very grandeur of type and of porportion is indeed a relic imbedded 
in Chinese art by Greco-Buddhist taste, even though the specifically 
Greek form be changed. Godoshi's art thus uses all that has come 
down to it from the past Pacific ruggedness, Han rhythm, the fine 
sculpture of the early South, the rich colour of the Tartar North, the 
dignity of Greco-Buddhism, and now the absolute pictorial form of 
independent brushwork. 

That Godoshi achieved mighty fame in his own day we have it 
from contemporary records. We have glimpses of him as the idol of 
the people, watched by them as he covered enormous wall surfaces with 
great rolling or fighting masses of spiritual beings : panoramas of heaven 
and hell, strange adventures from the life of the saints, flaming deities, 



132 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

and the wrath of gods upon the world, and the imperial splendours of 
a great Buddhist Court. He is not like Michel Angelo toiling lonely 
in the Sistine Chapel among a generation out of sympathy with his 
sternness ; rather like Phidias satisfying ripe public taste with the highest 
expression of its own beliefs. In the absence of newspapers such a 
public art becomes a kind of organ for self-realization. 

Some critics claim that no genuine pieces of Godoshi have come 
down to our own day ; but we can come very close to him at a number 
of points, close enough to understand his dominion over the Eastern 
world, close enough to evaluate him in relation to the Western world. 
There remain three or four main types of his design which have come 
down to us in several more or less accurate copies. The first that we 
shall consider is the lace Kwannon and child type. This may have been 
an early thought of his, taking the conception of the very richly veiled 
Bosatsu from Eriuhon and early masters, but translating it into a 
magnificence of thick juicy line never before conceived. This type has 
probably existed in Japan in more than one version. One of these 
must have been seen by Kano Hogai in his early youth, for it was 
evidently used by him in making up his two great versions of the 
" Creation of Man." The version which I shall now describe, and 
which was brought to America from Japan in 1904, is in the great 
collection of Mr. Freer, and is doubtless the pen-work of some great 
master of Sung. The superlative grandeur, however far beyond 
ordinary Sung reach and clearly Tang in flavour proves that the 
main elements of the design must have belonged to Godoshi. There 
are rumours of another version, possibly older, concealed in one 
of Japan's great hereditary collections all of which have not yet 
been thoroughly explored. 

The design, which is very large, shows a standing Kwannon of 
great dignity and height, and enveloped in a lace veil, which descends 
from Heaven upon a cloud-like mass that breaks into the actual foam 
of water as it pierces space. This method of exhibiting water as 
the pure elementary symbol of Kwannon is unique so far as I know. 
Kwannon usually sits by the sea, she has holy water in a crystal vase ; 
but to descend through space on leaping foaming water is a Godoshi 
creation which Hogai has borrowed. The remains of a great cloud- 
curtain pull aside at the top, half concealing the tiara, which in this 
case is not pointed but heavy and square. This raised canopy of the 




STANDING KWANNON. By Godoshi (Wu Tao-tzu). 
Collection of Mr. Charles L. Freer. 



Of 



MYSTICAL BUDDHIST PAINTING 133 

curtain makes the figure seem more like an actual revelation, as in the 
Sistine Madonna of Raphael. But to what does he there is clearly a 
moustache descend ? This time to two boys who are playing in- 
nocently upon a bright cloud, trying to plant fresh lotos flowers in 
vases. These boys typify the originally spiritual nature of man, and 
their occupation his naturally religious instinct. But rolling in from the 
right is a sinister dark -green cloud, which seems like a crouching dragon 
with a flat toad head. Godoshi has not deigned to represent an 
actual dragon, as Cho Densu has done in his front-faced Kwannon. 
The mere cloud is more suggestive of the coming evil and of man's 
dual nature. But the great gracious figure, looking down upon these 
unconscious children with the hint of a beneficent smile, bears for them 
salvation and spiritual sustenance. In his raised left hand he sways 
the wisp of willow which in other pictures sits in a vase, as if 
he were actually sprinkling his proteges with the water of baptism ; 
and in his right he carries in a wicker basket a great tai fish as the 
symbol of spiritual sustenance. Here is where I think I detect a trace 
of Sung imagination. The Sung Kwannon with a fish is dressed as a 
fisherman's daughter. The tai here is too large, too much in evidence, 
and its somewhat coarse symbolism is not in harmony with that treat- 
ment which only suggested a dragon in the green cloud. Therefore, 
I believe that this fish-basket did not exist in the Godoshi original, 
but that the right hand took some other attitude, possibly pouring 
water from a vase, as in Hogai's version. But, leaving out this one 
feature, I believe we have substantially the Godoshi creation. 

jEsthetically the first noticeable feature is the magnificent spacing. 
The vertical mass of the Kwannon, which dominates three-quarters of the 
picture's height, gets space from the large mass of sky on the left, 
and breaks at the bottom into the horizontal masses of the water, 
clouds, and boys, that form for her a kind of aesthetic base. This 
sumptuous simplicity of spacing only the fish breaks. And the rhythms 
of the transition are not graceful and decorative, but massive and 
rugged. There is no obvious premeditated system of curvature. The 
boys are drawn with naive simplicity, of a size which is a great gain 
upon the little insignificant figure in the Enriuhon conception. Even 
the lotos is spiky, scorning the pretty sculptural outlines of petals. 

The drawing of the Kwannon, set at an angle to the spectator, is 
superb. Not only the drapery but the flesh portions are full of 



134 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

life and movement. The two feet, swathed in crinkly masses of soft 
stuff, sit with fine solidity upon the small lotos shoes. The raised arm 
and hand with the willow are the most graceful things in art. But 
perhaps nothing can surpass the fine rounded head, with its short nose, 
its wonderful slits of eyes, and its lotos-bud of a mouth ; probably 
the finest Kwannon face in all Chinese and Japanese art. 

If we were to dilate upon all the intricate rhythms of the drapery 
lines, of the splendours of crown, jewelry, and lace mantle, we 
should have to expand this book to another volume. Of course 
words quite fail, and yet it is worth pointing out that all which I 
have said of " lead-lines " in general, and of Godoshi's line in par- 
ticular, is here magnificently exemplified. What the rhythm of such 
flexible line may become is seen in the complicated yet easy knotting 
of the loose end of the under-garment gathered over the abdomen. 
Again, when the several kinds of drapery flow over the feet under- 
skirt, garment, mantle, and veil there is line-wealth almost worthy 
of the Parthenon female torsos. Here in the very photograph colour 
is indicated : in the lines even, the relative forces of which, translated 
from colour and texture with dark and light, exemplify well the 
technical quality " notan of line." The drawing of the veil in cream- 
white is a new thing, the lines being more thick, more forceful, 
and more decisive than the gauzy suggestions of Enriuhon. That 
still retains Indian feeling. This is frankly Chinese ; the whole pic- 
ture, indeed, shows just how Chinese Buddhist painting takes rank in 
spiritual force and expression far above Indian, or any other racial 
species, in fact. For it is true that though a few Japanese painters 
come somewhere near this ripe line-grandeur of Godoshi, they do not 
quite reach it. 

It remains to speak a word of the colour. This is far less 
opulent and gaudy than the Enriuhon piece. A little strong red, 
blue, and green are found on the boys. The Kwannon 's drapery 
has subdued shades of these, tending to olives. Fine patterning, low 
tone upon tone, overlies the garments. There is no gold anywhere, 
not even on the crown and the jewels. All is suggested by firm tint 
only. It is the flesh colour of the Kwannon, however, that dominates 
all, being now an intimate grouping of rich, warm tones of purplish 
reds, not unlike the tones that Abbot Thayer puts into his flesh, but 
more glowing. Really, the colour is hardly inferior to the line. 




GODOSHI " SHAKA." 

Mr. Charles L. Freer. 



Of 



MYSTICAL BUDDHIST PAINTING 135 

Another Godoshi type, preserved in several replicas by Yeiga, Cho 
Densu, and Motonobu, is of a seated front-facing Kwannon. Some- 
where may be hidden a Chinese original from which all of these were 
taken between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, and which is 
not known to our generation. We believe the great Motonobu paint- 
ing, formerly one of the greatest treasures of Marquis Hachisuka's 
collection, and now in the Fenollosa collection at Boston, to come 
the nearest to Godoshi. This was a most celebrated picture in both 
Ashikaga and early Tokugawa days, as is shown by the existence in 
the Kano archives of a magnificent copy of it by Tanyu. I knew 
this copy before the original turned up in the great emporium of 
Yamanaka in Osaka, about 1882. It had been given away to a 
retainer by the Marquis, as so many daimo treasures were given in 
the sad parting of ten years before, when families of faithful retainers, 
loyal through seven centuries some of them, were absolved from their 
feudal vows and became citizens of a new democratic Japan. Treasures 
like this soon found their way into pawnshops, and so, at a day when 
the revived taste of a new aristocracy had not yet formed, into the 
general market. I thus bought for twenty-five yen what would be 
worth thousands were it sold in Japan to-day. 

The noble figure, clothed in a single ample mantle of solid white, 
shows flesh tints, and a little green at waist and in crown. The 
severity of the composition is to be remarked. The veil has been 
discarded. Jewels have been reduced to a minimum. There is nothing 
but the lines of the one drapery, but these are most magnificent like 
the complicated massing of folds in a splendid marble statue. Only 
the utmost care has been lavished on these brush lines, their purity, 
their tapering, their length, their strength. The force in the stroke is 
transcendent. What strikes one chiefly about these lines is their 
angularity, very different from the rounded touches that Motonobu 
frequently delights in. It is this unwonted dignity of the line systems 
that leads me to ascribe the essential in the creation to Godoshi's mind. 
The background is naturally treated, a gap between two cliffs through 
which two large circular halos are faintly seen. Waves plash up at the 
bottom. Since similar landscape occurs in the Yeiga version, it probably 
goes back to China, though the details have been modified by Motonobu. 

We come now to the great Godoshi design of Sakyamuni (Shaka), 
the last historical Buddha. This exists in at least two versions, one of 



136 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

which, the centre of the Tofukuji triptych, has always been held by 
Japanese critics as not only a genuine Godoshi, but the standard of 
Godoshi. I am inclined to believe it the genuine thing, partly because 
the face is so much superior to even the great Sung heads. If a Sung 
copy, it should be by Ririomin. It has influenced Sesshu and all the 
great Japanese creators. The Buddha sits cross-legged on a rock, with 
hands folded under his robe in one of the mystic and secret finger 
symbols. (In.) The robe is of a quiet smouldering red that flames 
up at the angles into orange. A fine lotos pattern is worked over this 
robe, which in the gleaming orange portions heightens into gold. The 
colour of the face is rich Venetian flesh. But the extraordinary power 
lies in the line, the most spiky, splintery, modulating and solid of any 
of the Godoshi pieces. It takes on the very splendour of textures while 
it stands as supreme decoration. The solid masses of the head, aided 
by the rich notan of the colours, make it and the shoulders and the 
hands rise up like great cliffs of mountains. There is something 
elemental and ultimate about it. All that is small in one actually 
shrivels before the original. As you sit before it, it grips you with a 
direct spiritual power which no one of the early statues but Shotoku 
Taishi's Chuguji Kwannon possesses. This shows the very finest use of 
the Tang lead-lines. 

The other replica of this piece, of about the same size, is the great 
Shaka owned by Mr. Freer which will be in the national collection at 
Washington, and which came from the collection of the Japanese artist 
Zeshin, along with the Rakans by Ririomin. In probably was imported 
into Japan at the same time with the Rakans, and was used with them 
in temple service. The disposition of the drapery is exactly the same 
as the Godoshi piece, and only the lines are a bit less juicy than the 
Tofukuji piece, and the colour is colder. The chief difference, however, 
lies in the head, which is more clearly of a Sung type, something like 
the heads of Choshokio's Shakas. That is, the face is more emaciated, 
like a sorrowing Christ's, and the hair is less sculptural, being scattered 
into long fine locks tossing in the wind. The Tofukuji, if not the 
original, is probably a Tang copy of it ; the Freer is probably an early 
Sung adaptation, but probably not by Ririomin. Both are among the 
finest paintings left us by any ancient race. 

The other two paintings of the Tofukuji triptych, are a young 
Monju with his lion, and a young Fugen upon an elephant : the 




THE MONJU OF TOFUKUJI. 
By Godoshi (Wu Tao-tzu). 



Of 



MYSTICAL BUDDHIST PAINTING 137 

regular companions of the Sakyamuni Trinity in both the Tendai and 
the Ten sects, as distinct from the Amida and Yakushi Trinities. Both 
of these were probably historical personages, the Monju being identified 
with an early Indian missionary to Nepaul. However this may be, 
Monju is generally represented with a roll of scripture in one hand, 
and a jewelled wand in the other ; and he symbolizes the power of 
scripture, of inspiration, of divine interpretation. Fugen varies, some- 
times holding a mace like Monju's, sometimes an open book, or a 
lettered scroll ; and he symbolizes the power of church organization, 
of ritual, of the communion of the saints. So that we may regard 
this well-known Trinity as a human embodiment of the original " Three 
Precious Things," so often recurring in scripture and in prayer " the 
Law, the Church, and the Buddha " corresponding indeed in a certain 
real sense to " Father, Holy Ghost, and Son." 

In this Monju of Tufukuji we have Godoshi's most charming and 
gracious figure ; a youth with beautiful Greek head, long hair falling 
over his shoulders, and a splendid drawing of soft drapery not unlike 
that of the standing Kwannon. The gold upon the jewels has probably 
been retouched, detracting a little from the solid power of the presence. 
The Fugen is more crabbed in line, and seems more like a copy than 
the other two. But there is another splendid Fugen at Mioshinji, 
which, though ascribed to the Sung artist Barin, can have no relation 
to him except as a copyist. It is surely a design of Tang (To), 
though possibly, on account of its unquiet lines of drapery more like 
those of Fugetsu to be ascribed to a later date in Tang than Godoshi. 
Even so, it has probably been originally based upon Godoshi, and 
exhibits his power and presence. This is of an older man, square- 
headed, with hair matted as if wet, yet swept forward in the same 
spiritual draft that disarranges the drapery. The lines do not have 
the Godoshi modulation. This piece has strongly influenced Sesshu. 

Altogether we must regard Godoshi, whether as compared with 
architects, sculptors, or painters, as one of the very greatest of the line 
masters of the world. His figures do not look cheap, even when seen 
in the same blow of the eye with photographs of Phidias and 
Michel Angelo. 

Of early Tang paintings, not related to Godoshi, there are many in 
the form of Rakan pictures, nearly square, showing the doings of the 
Arhats, or Buddhist saints in the flesh. Animals and primitive tree 

VOL. I. M 



138 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

drawing enter into these. The flesh is often outlined in red. The 
composition is not elaborate. Yet there is sometimes a solid grandeur 
about the spacing, and a very rich colour working between blue, green 
and strange oranges which raise them to high rank.* 

The aesthetic reign of Genso was disturbed in 755 by a great palace 
intrigue headed by the powerful alien courtier whom Genso had be- 
friended, and who is popularly supposed to have been in collusion with 
the " Helen " of China, Genso's lovely young comrade, Yokihi. In 
the mad flight from the capital, Yokihi paid for her sins with her life; 
and Genso was forced by his few faithful generals to abdicate in favour 
of his son. The revolt was finally put down, but Genso returned, 
a solitary old man, to a ruined capital. Rihaku and Toshimi have 
left powerful political satires upon these disordered times, and later 
poets have dwelt upon their pathos. The supposed perfect union 
between Buddhism and Confucianism had shown the rift deep down in 
the former. Puritanism was driven at least one stage toward self- 
consciousness, and had now a weapon in its hand. 

But, far away from the capital, on beautiful Tendai mountain, the 
secret Buddhism of lofty rights and superhuman purification went on 
under the great Daishi and his successor, Ejitsu of Toji. A peculiar 
art grew up in those sacred regions, which partakes of the general 
nature of Tang art, yet forms a special brand of it. I refer first to 
the hieratic altar pieces, or Mandara (mystic circles), which, hung before 
the advanced pupil or officiating priest, showed him the higher spiritual 
categories in their proper involution and integrating, gave him a 
detailed inventory both of the cosmos and of the psychic, and helped 
him in the verbal invocation. Such Mandara were brought back to 
Japan by students from that island who had gone to China especially 
to enrol themselves as neophytes at Tendai. Some of them are in 

* The enumeration and location of other Tang (To) paintings in Japan were among 
the things the writer left blank. He intended to supply these and all other deficiencies 
when he could get to Japan again, have access to archives, and consult with old colleagues. 
In attempting to follow out his wishes the editor went in person to Japan, remaining 
through the spring of 1910, and received priceless assistance upon all such points of doubt. 
In this case, the one piece of information concerned a picture called " Tenjukoku Mandara," 
Tenjukoku being the "after-name" of the Japanese Prince " Shotoku." It is not even a 
painting, but a very ancient piece of fine embroidery, said to have been done by the ladies 
of the Tang court from a design by a contemporary artist. It is now mounted in the shape 
of a kakemono, is quite a good deal rubbed and defaced, and is kept in the temple of 
Chuguji at Horiuji, Nara. 






MYSTICAL BUDDHIST PAINTING 139 

colour, some in fine gold lines drawn upon a dark ground. The lines, 
though fine, have a certain thickening and pen quality which render 
them objects of great beauty. Rich flower designs, largely of lotos, 
and scroll work also in gold, surround the separate panels. The 
central panel contains the spirit of the central category, the God of 
the Shingon sect a still more esoteric branch of the Tendai Dai 
Nichi Niorai, or the great Sun Tathagata. He is not even called a 
Buddha. He is the central demiurge, in Bodhisattwa costume, but 
with supreme power in the cosmos ; in short, to the spiritual universe 
what the sun is to our system. The art is pretty close to imported 
Indian, already working toward those forms which later become the 
Gods of Hinduism. How strongly this kind of Tang art affected 
Japan we shall soon see. 

Another fine form of Tendai painting was the portraits of great 
priests, from Nagergina downward, the man who had founded this 
mystic ritual. These portraits are very characteristic of Tang, being 
very strong, with flesh tint, and lined in simple powerful brush strokes, 
generally of ink, that do not thicken to Godoshi's scale, but remain 
everywhere something like thick firm wires. In this respect they are 
more like the Rakan of early Tang. Many such portraits were brought 
to Japan by the new founders. Probably the greatest of all, and one 
of the most powerful portraits of the world, is the painting of Tendai 
Daishi himself, preaching, owned by the great shipbuilder of Kobe, 
Mr. Kawasaki. Here the lines are of wonderful fineness, the features 
transcendent, and the colour most delicate and beautiful. It is nearly 
of life-size, and must be by one of the greatest Buddhist masters 
of Tang. 

But beside these works of painting in the eighth century, sculpture 
still took an important place, even if subordinate. In the large 
ceramic Buddha's head, found by me in the ash barrel at Daigoji in 
1884 and now owned by the Art School in Tokio, we have one of the 
earliest relics of Tendai sculpture. Doubtless it formed a portion of a 
complete ceramic Buddha which was destroyed, all but this head, in the 
great fire of Daigoji in the twelfth century. After 1868 the priests were 
tired of keeping the fragment, whose tradition was lost, and so had thrown 
it away. It is not only most important because the rounded form of 
the head and the somewhat flat features show us just the sculptural 
type of head which Godoshi followed in his painting of the Tofukuji 

M ?. 



140 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

Buddha; but also because it is an authentic piece of hard glazed 
ceramic belonging to the eighth and probably the early eighth 
century. The clay is whitish, midway between pottery and true 
porcelain. The glaze, which is used chiefly on the curls of the 
hair, is whitish with a little green streaked through it. It is handed 
down, but on tradition only, that there was real porcelain in Tang ; 
and this piece seems to confirm it.* There was softer glazed ware 
in several colours, cream, white, olive, brown, grey and yellow, 
although in Shosoin there is no glazed ware but the mottled green 
and yellow. The white, which seems either an ancestor or a contemporary 
of the famous Corean white glazed ware, may well be an invention of 
the later eighth century. 

But another splendid form of Tendai sculpture was in wood ; and, 
chiefly as coming down to our day, the strong portrait statues of great 
philosophers and priests. Two of the finest are the figures, some- 
what larger than life, of Vasubandhu and Asangpo, which formerly 
stood together on the altar of Chukondo at Kofukuji. These are 
sometimes considered by Japanese critics to be native and of a later date. 
But in their transcendent simple style, faces of utmost power, Chinese 
details in drapery, and realistic modelling as free as the finest Greco- 
Buddhist, we can find no analogy with typical Japanese sculpture. 
They are far grander, and have the force of the great painted portraits 
of Tendai Tang. In spite of the peeling off" of the paint which once 
covered them, and of the broken hands, they seem rather to be actual 
human presences than statues. 

By the ninth century, under Genso's successors Tokuso and Kenso, 
belief in Buddhism again took strong hold upon the Imperial Court ; 
but now there was no such na'ive unconsciousness of difference between 
the two halves of Japanese genius. The leader of the Puritan Con- 
fucians, Kentaishi, China's greatest prose writer, and one of the best 
of Tang poets, dared, though already under the Imperial ban, to write 
strongly against what he believed to be degrading superstitions. In 
the year 818 Kenso had ordered precious relics, reported to be some 
of the very bones of Buddha, to be brought from India to China, 
and he and his court undertook to worship them. Then Kentaishi 
spoke out, and declared, in a rescript which has ever since been a 

* Mr. Charles L. Freer of Detroit, one of the world's greatest experts and collectors of 
ancient pottery, asserts that at this time there was pottery. THE ED. 



MYSTICAL BUDDHIST PAINTING 141 

kind of constitution for the Confucian scholars, that Kenso was 
violating the sacredness of ancestral customs and would only bring 
disaster on the empire. This was the first "rift within the lute," 
which was destined to rise to an all-threatening problem of policy 
in Sung, and to lead to a palsying of the Chinese mind in later 
Ming. Now began a kind of see-saw between the two great Court 
parties, now one triumphing, now the other. In 845, for instance, 
many Buddhist temples were destroyed and the building of new ones 
forbidden. Faction leads to internal revolt, and the end of the century 
finds the Tang power tottering, with the capital again moved eastward 
to Loyang. 

The Tang paintings of the ninth century are a greater elaboration 
of the style found in the ancient Rakans. The line is not as thick 
as Godoshi's, but thickens as if it were a wire ribbon seen at different 
angles. The faces are a little coarse, the forms ungraceful, but there 
is great wealth of colour, a Chinese vermilion being used which seems 
to be almost as dark as crimson. The large Nirvana painting at 
Tofukuji, ascribed to Godoshi, is of this age. Also the large 
painting of Buddha preaching.* The Rakan pictures of this day are 
carefully drawn, and have rich landscape backgrounds. The trees, 
drawn in rich opaque colours like jades, are a manifest advance upon 
the early Tang and pre-Tang Tartar trees. 

Ink painting is also in vogue at this day, and the hieratic Shingon 
style, which now uses exquisite opaque Tartar colouring for the original 
fine gold lines. An example of this is the splendid Bodhisattwa of 
the peacock at Ninnoji of Kioto. 

By the tenth century the Kettan a rising Tartar tribe from the 
North-west had almost annihilated the Northern provinces. In the 
south, west, and south-east, localities were declaring their independence 
of Tang. According to Chinese reckoning Tang is officially abolished 
in 905 and a series of petty dynasties, each lasting a few years, brings 
on an interregnum of great confusion between 905 and 960, which may 
be called the " interpolation of the 5 dynasties." As in all such dis- 
ordered times, the Confucians, with their ready organization, came to 
the front ; and they now succeeded in 955 in having a large number 
of ancient bronze Buddhas destroyed and cast into coins. It is this deep 

* Probably the To painting in Chonoji temple, in the village of O'Toku-ni, 
Yamasho. 



142 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

reaction in the Chinese mind which has led to so many destructions 
and revolutions in art, and which has made Tang art of the great 
Buddhist period so rare in China itself. 

But in this very confusion a last independent phase of Tang art 
flared up. The local geniuses of the provinces found expression ; 
and even great Buddhist priests like Zengetsu have left us stupendous 
conceptions. His great work is sets of the Rakan, single figures of 
large size the finest being the 18 Rakan of Kodaiji. The drawing 
of tree forms here is gnarly and powerful to the last degree. The 
line is the wire line of the early Rakan, but used with wonderful 
originality and twisting into strange splendid systems. The colour is 
more wonderful still, quite eschewing the bright reds, greens, and 
blues of Tartar tradition, and confining both flesh and draperies to 
strange quiet transparent tones of browns, olives, and unnamable 
purples. All grace is lacking : the figures are elemental like great 
lumps of rock ; the heads are often distorted ; yet a powerful realism 
that can even deal minutely with textures remains. 

It is a question whether the strange set of "Jewish" Rakans belongs 
to this or the preceding century ; they are kept at Kataiji, at Higashiyama, 
near Kioto. Though Buddhist and with halos the Semitic cast of 
countenances is evidently intentional. These exceptional pieces may 
have arisen by a mistaking in later Tang the oflSciators in the 
half-ruined synagogues in China for Indian, that is, Western, types. 
The Arabs hated Buddhism so heartily that they would hardly have 
become mistaken for Rakan. 

Taking Tang Buddhist art as a whole, we have seen how Greco- 
Buddhism gave it an inspiration in the seventh century ; and how 
internal causes carried it to a kind of culmination under Godoshi in the 
eighth, from which point it rapidly declined through the ninth and 
tenth centuries. The revival of art which now supervenes, though even 
beginning during the five short dynasties, properly belongs to the 
history of the all-conquering Sung that came in in 960. 




RAKAN HOLDING WAND. 

By the priest Zengetsu Daishi (Kuan Chiu). 
At Kcdaiji. 






0* 



CHAPTER VIII. 

MYSTICAL BUDDHIST ART IN JAPAN. 
Fujiwara. 

MYSTICAL Buddhist art, or the arts of the mystical sects of 
Buddhism (Tendai and Shingon as named in Japan), which 
we have been studying in its Chinese phases of Tang and 
Sung, was introduced into Japan from Tang in the eighth century. 
In order to understand what a change this was for Japanese art, and 
with what political and social changes for Japan this new art was bound, 
we must go back to the end of Chapter VI., where I briefly described 
the decay of the Nara life and art which followed after the death of 
Shomu Tenno in 748. Under the Empress Koken many abuses were 
practised, statesmen were exiled, priests exalted to high rank, and art 
became coarse and traditional. The good days of Genso's reign in 
Tang were passing over China without leaving any contemporary 
mark on the island capital. Quite a number of Japanese scholars, 
like Abe no Nakamaro, were studying in Tang, but their pro-Chinese 
recommendations had little weight. A great religious revival, that 
of Tendai, was passing over China, filling even the ranks of the 
court with the inspiration of spiritual knighthood, but it left Japan cold. 
To be sure, one waif from the crest of this new wave had been 
thrown upon Japan as early as 699. The hermit, En no Gioja, 
was a Chinese disciple of the new cult, and, coming to Japan, had 
tried to interest the people in his mysticism. But the devotees of 
the older abstract views had denounced him as a magician, and 
banished him to the mountains of Idzu. There he is said to have 
practised his mystic contemplations, communing with nature and with 



H4 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

the elemental spirits of rock and stream ready to respond to his 
bidding. In this way he was a despised forerunner of mysticism, 
afterwards honoured as a pioneer and often represented as a holy 
hermit as in the fine bronze group of the fifteenth century. But in 
spite of the languid curiosity of a few persons concerning his doctrine, 
the Nara Court was ready to go with the old worn-out formulas, 
hardly virile enough in their moral generalizations or in their aesthetic 
beauty to withstand the undermining of luxury. 

So things went on in the luxurious capital of Nara, with a 
decayed Greco-Buddhist art, until the year 782, when a new and 
powerful emperor, Kwammu, destined to reign twenty-four years, came 
to the throne. In his first thought he identified Buddhism with all 
the abuses of his predecessors, and so he ordered that no more 
temples should be built and that no more of the people's land 
should be diverted to temple support. Moreover, he conceived 
that the city of Nara, although such an enormous mass of capital 
was invested therein, was too much associated with old ways to be 
longer retained, and so in his third year he sent a surveyor to 
the neighbouring province of Yamashiro to look for a promising site. 
Already his thought was that the new civilization of China the 
wonderful poetry, and painting, and laws, and court officers and 
functions, the stately music, the universities, the diffusing of learning 
throughout the Court that all these ripe elements of culture 
should be carefully studied, and transplanted bodily to a new 
Japan which he himself would create. Confucius was already 
publicly worshipped. If the Confucian scholars of China had not 
been such unmitigated Chauvinists they might well have transplanted 
their own cult to the neighbouring state. But fortunately for Japan 
these Bourbons considered China a divine essence apart from a 
negligible world. It is interesting to see that the Japanese nature was 
so far back, as now, ready to accept and incorporate every element of 
any foreign civilization that could be put to the national advantage. 
Kwammu, in short, was to his day what the illustrious Mutsuhito, 
already in the 39th year of his reign, is to the present. Thus we can 
say that he stands at the commencement of a second great era in 
Japanese civilized history the first having been opened by Shotoku 
Taishi nearly two centuries before a second period both of general 
culture and of art. This second period was marked by a strong upward 




PORTRAIT OF A PRIEST. By Kobo Daishi. 



OF 



MYSTICAL BUDDHIST ART IN JAPAN 145 

wave at the close of the eighth century. We have only to note that 
it is contemporary with the culmination of the parallel Tang wave. 

Now it happened that just as Kwanimu was meditating these 
sweeping changes, a great Japanese genius a young man who had been 
studying for years with Dosui, the hierarch of the mystical Buddhist 
sect on Tendai mountain returned to his native country fully prepared 
to become the apostle of this powerful new doctrine in its island world. 
This is the man known to us as Dengio Daishi, who, whether he could, 
as alleged, perform physical miracles or no, at least had that reach of 
mind which enabled him to appreciate, utilize and direct the forces 
involved in Kwammu's projected reforms. His first step was to convince 
Kwammu that it was really the Tendai spirit that lay at the basis of 
China's greatness, and that it would be a most powerful makeweight as 
a new court Buddhism against the effete Nara sects. Thus what might 
have been a too thorough Chauvinizing of Japan was diverted by 
Dengio into a kind of mystical theocracy such as never existed in China 
or any other Buddhist kingdom. In 788 Dengio, foreknowing Kwammu's 
decision concerning the new site, built his first cathedral church, 
Enriakuji, near the top of Mount Hyei, which rises from the waves of 
Lake Biwa, thus trying to reproduce the isolated conditions of Tendai 
itself. But Dengio and Kwammu were working in perfect accord ; and 
in 794 the capital was formally transferred from Nara to the new 
Yamashiro site, at the land base of Mount Hiyei. Here a fine valley, 
some five miles wide, had been selected, sloping gradually to the open 
South from foot hills, and flanked on East and West with lofty 
mountain ranges. Here the ground was laid out as much as possible 
like the Chinese capital of Genso, with fine North and South running 
thoroughfares crossed regularly with broad avenues from East to West. 
From a large rectangular tract in the centre of the North side arose the 
many buildings and garden hillocks of the Imperial palace. In a few 
years the population had deserted Nara, and adapted themselves to these 
more spacious accommodations. Canals faced with stone carried fresh 
water from the mountains through the city. Within twenty-five years 
a considerable portion of Central Nara had relapsed to its original rice- 
fields ; but Kioto could boast of more than a million citizens. It was 
the thousandth anniversary of this great removal which the Japanese 
celebrated by an international exposition at Kioto in 1894. The new 
buildings erected at that time, the Taikiokuden, were intended to be a 



146 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

close approximation to the style of Chinese architecture which Kwammu 
himself used. 

A few years later, in 806, a second great prelate came back from 
China to Japan with the prestige of a much longer study on Tendai 
mountain than Dengio. No doubt this Kuki, or Kobo Daishi, was a 
far more powerful religious genius than Dengio, as also a far greater 
artist. He founded the special and concentratedly mystical sect of 
Shingon, as supplementary to Tendai. This was the first great sect 
originated by a Japanese. Kobo is said to have performed most 
startling miracles before the Kioto court; and he probably did a still 
more wonderful service in inventing the Japanese syllabary, a phonetic 
semi-substitute for the difficult Chinese writing. He was likewise a 
great metaphysical philosopher, Professor Inouye of the Imperial 
University holding that we shall eventually find his work to be the 
ripest piece of speculation in all Asia, building superstructures upon 
Vasabandhu and Asangpo, as these build both on Buddha and on 
the Vedas. Had he arrived upon the scene a few years earlier he 
might have made more effective and more liberal the very reforms 
undertaken by Dengio. As it was, he removed his first Cathedral 
seat far away from Kioto to Mount Koya in the SoutherriV part of 
Yamato in 816. He travelled also all over Japan, even to the 
barbarous North, founding monasteries on his way. He was more 
for the people, and less for an Imperial theocracy. 

A special mission to study in China was sent in 803. The Tokaido 
highway was opened eastward as far as Hikone. The whole East 
of Japan had finally been won from the Ainos in a big battle in 80 1. 
Special Chinese court ceremonies were adoped in 820. In 827 Kobo 
had become so powerful in the palace that at his request the Emperor 
ordered the bones of Buddha to be brought to him at the palace. 
Meanwhile several histories of Japan and books of law had been 
compiled. Ono-no Takamura, the friend of Kobo, and who painted 
his portrait, was sent as special student to China in 836. 

But perhaps the greatest service of Kobo Daishi to Japan was 
that he introduced Tang art, and especially Tendai art, into Japan ; and 
with such firm ingrafting that it became thoroughly naturalized, even 
if slightly modified. It was Kobo who personally brought back 
hundreds of paintings, among them the great portraits of the founders 
of mysticism, and the largest specimens of the magic Mandara, which 




IS 



gp 



of tt 
o* 






MYSTICAL BUDDHIST ART IN JAPAN 147 

are found in somewhat dilapidated condition at his favorite Kioto 
temple, Toji. Toji has always been the great Shingon temple of Kioto, 
as Enriakuji has been the Tendai, and Daitokuji the Zen. Kobo 
made himself the intimate friend of all the young Japanese who aspired 
to Chinese learning, among them the famous Ono no Nakamura; and, 
being a great painter and sculptor himself, he taught them to create in 
the strong Tang style. Indeed from his day it has been part of the 
discipline and function of every Shingon priest both to paint and to 
carve Buddhist altar pieces. The first school of the new civilization 
is therefore a school of priestly artists with Kobo at their head. 

It should be added that in 864 a third great Japanese prelate 
returned from Tendai and founded a branch sect of that name at 
Miidera of Otsu, near Lake Biwa, which has maintained to this day a 
hierarchical organization separate from that of Hiyei-zan. This man, 
Chisho Daishi, was almost as great a man as Kobo, but more of a 
recluse. Perhaps the highest Mahatmaship of Japan has been practised 
in the temple which he founded. My first great teacher in Buddhism, 
Keitoku Ajari (Ajari is Bishop) became the hierarch of this sect just 
before his death, and my fellow-pupil, Kwanrio Ajari, officiates to-day 
as Archbishop of Miidera.* Chiso, like Kobo, was also a great painter 
and also brought back with him many Chinese Tang portraits and 
models. Other prelates followed during the century, such as Jukiku 
Daishi, but these three (Dengio, Kobo, and Chisho) may be called 
the founders of mystical Buddhism and its art in Japan. 

The art of the inceptive stage of this new period, roughly the 
ninth century, may be said to be a mixture of the new Tang style 
with the somewhat over-decorative traditions of the old Nara style 
that could not be at once wholly discarded. Moreover, the very 
predominance of the Shingon, or Mandara, among the general Tang 
styles in Japan tended rather to encourage the effeminate tendencies 
of Nara art than would have the style of Godoshi had it then been 
known. This tendency was partly counteracted by the strength of the 
portrait style as introduced from Tang. In sculpture is found the 
same double tendency a strength in portraiture and in militant types, 
but an effeminacy in carved Buddhas and Bodhisattwas and other 

*The Ajari Kwanrio, having already appointed his young successor, has taken the 
name " Keiyen " under which he still presides over the important Archbishopric of 
Miidera. 



148 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

Mandara deities. Yet, in spite of all conservation, it can be said 
that the art of the days of Kobo is more nearly like Chinese than the 
more culminating art that comes a little later in Kwanpei and Engi. 

The transition from Nara art to Kwammu art is probably 
given us, in painting, with the splendidly-preserved representation on 
silk, and in brilliant colours, of the eleven - headed Kwannon 
seated, formerly at Horiuji, and now in the collection of Marquis 
Inouye. It is possible that the grace of this fine piece is an 
example of Shomu work in Tempei, rather than of Kwammu. But 
in sculpture undoubted transitions are the big, heavy, standing 
Buddha of Miroku in Todaiji, so fat and clumsy that it looks about to 
burst, and the large seated fat gilt trinity upon the altar of Bisjamondo 
at Seirioji. 

Perhaps by Kobo Daishi himself, and with the transition to the 
new Tang type much more complete, is the great painted triptych 
of the coming of Buddha in glory through clouds filled with Bodhi- 
sattwa. This uses full colour, rather than gilding, and there are 
traces of the Greco - Buddhist manner, but nothing of the hard, 
wiry, Corean lines of Tempei painting. The effect is broad and 
the notan fine. The side panels with Bodhisattwa playing on instru- 
ments are beautiful and naive. In some faces the effect of laughing 
is given. 

Other paintings by Kobo Daishi are the portrait of Ono no 
Takamura in Koninji, at Yamato, and the large, standing figure of 
Jizo in the Fenollosa collection at Boston. Quite like him, and very 
Tang in style, are the portrait of Kobo and the front-faced standing 
Jizo by Ono no Takamura. Several paintings remain ascribed to 
Chisho Daishi, the strong yellow Fudo of Nara shrine and the 
strange Fudo with many doji (boys) at Miooin, in Koyasan, which 
is very much like Tang. 

Many sculptures are attributed to Kobo, one of the most probable 
being the great Fudo of Toji. This is the first time that this subject, 
a distinctly mystic motive, has been mentioned in our history. Fudo 
is a type of the apparently violent beings in the spiritual world who 
take rank with Bodhisattwa. His flesh is blue, he has torches in 
his mouth, his face writhes, he holds a sword in his right hand, a 
cord in his left. This seems related to the more terrible Shivaistic 
deities of modern Hinduism. To the thoughtless foreign commentator 




EARLY CHINESE BUDDHIST PAINTING. 
Collection of Mr. Charles L. Freer. 



. 

OF THF 
UNIVERSITY OF ItUNOl! 



MYSTICAL BUDDHIST ART IN JAPAN 149 

they are one and all abominable relics of " devil " worship. But 
Fudo may properly be called the Bodhisattwa of the will, of 
self-restraint, the power to cut out temptation, to bind the unruly 
passions. Fudo means " The Unmoved," and he is usually represented 
as surrounded with a halo of fire, which he does not feel. In the Toji 
statue, the square logs of his throne are really a pyre of wood for 
flames. Jizo, too, is a new Bodhisattwa type, this time gracious and 
peaceful, the guardian of little children and of travellers, the descender 
into Hell, where he intercedes for the souls of infants. Japan is full 
of wayside shrines to Jizo, whose stone images are almost covered by 
votive offerings of pebbles by travellers. One of the most striking 
of these early Jizos is cut, life-size and in high relief, out of a 
mountain ledge on the little path across the Hakone mountains from 
Ashinoyu to Hakone. This is said to have been carved by Kobo him- 
self on his journey to the North ; yet, though the conception is 
primitive Tang and mostly of Kobo, he would hardly have spared 
time for its execution. It is more likely that it was afterwards prepared 
from his drawings. 

But probably the most powerful sculpture of this day is found in 
the militant spirits, Bisjamon's Shi Ten O and Yakushi's generals, often 
very large carvings in wood, and with fine spirit and motion. These 
are much fuller of drapery than the corresponding Chinese work of the 
seventh century. There is little of the effeminacy and merely decorative 
quality of Tempei sculpture. It is all robust and large and realistic, 
deeply carved, with the bigness of Tang feeling in it. It is hard to say 
whether some of the finest examples may not be originals from Tang. 
Typical specimens are found in Nanyendo of Kofukuji, in Toji, in 
Koyasan. 



The study of ornament too in smaller articles is of great interest ; 
boxes and vases of lacquer and metal, and stuffs. Of this there is 
much in Koyasan and at Saidaiji. 

The ripe harvest of all this Chinese sowing comes on slowly, 
after three generations, with the advent of the Emperor Daigo in 898. 
His glorious reign lasted down to 930, of which 22 years are 
reckoned under the famous era, Engi (901-922). This period named 
" Engi " must doubtless be reckoned the high-water mark of Japanese 



150 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

civilization, as Genso's " Kaigen " had been that of China. Never 
again would either China or Japan be quite so rich, splendid, and full 
of free genius. In Japan, however, it might not be quite correct to 
speak of this as a supreme culmination in art, since it is only the 
second apex of five nearly equal mountain heights. But in general 
culture and in luxurious refinement of a life which equally ministered 
to mind and to body, not only not in Japan, but perhaps not in the 
world, was there ever again anything quite so exquisite. Shomu's day 
at Nara had been great, but it was a childish though over-grown 
patriarchship. Genso at Loyang and Pericles at Athens had seen 
stronger, more daring creation. The later Florence of the Medici 
was to surpass it in sheer intellectual force and the Hangchow of 
Sung in naturalness and vitality of art. But in a delicate aristocratic 
culture on a scale comprising a vast city, and whose finest essences 
are original poetry and music, nothing before or since probably has 
possessed a more perfect flavour. It was like the production of a 
wonderful, unique, and unheard-of flower whose shape and colour 
transcend the limits of all known species. 

I have already intimated that this great world of palace culture 
was in some real sense a theocracy ; and this is another feature which 
differentiates it from all the world's great illuminations. Athens and 
Florence were frankly pagan. Loyang and Hangchow were half- 
pagan. But the Kioto of Engi practically worshipped in one vast 
temple, without decay of heart or intellect. Here, indeed, the mystical 
Buddhism of Tendai and Shingon came to its social throne ; nowhere 
in China did it take such absolute root and bear such luscious harvest. 
It may be said that Dengio on his Mount Hiyei, if not Kwammu by his 
Kamo river, had foreseen much of this. The compact between these 
two founders, the spiritual and the temporal, was one that the successors 
of the former would enforce. The Tendai prelate was to be the 
Emperor's adviser and father confessor, the vicegerent on earth of 
those very spiritual forms that should guarantee the Imperial throne. 
Before Gods and the archbishop should the Mikado kneel ; while armed 
monks from the populous monasteries should if necessary defend the 
temporal sovereignty. It was a sort of compact between Church and 
State, not at all unlike that which Charlemagne was to make with 
Pope Leo the Third, and curiously enough only six years later. 
Kwammu founded Kioto in 794, and the great Charles of Germany 




WOODEN IMAGE OF Fuo6. By K6b<"> Daishi. 



OF 
UNIVERSITY C'i 



MYSTICAL BUDDHIST ART IN JAPAN 151 

signed the convention of Rome in 800. It may be no great 
strain of analogy to designate this duplex authority which thereafter 
underlay Japanese civilization as "The Holy Kioto Empire." It is 
true that Tendai Buddhism was in time partially superseded ; and it is 
true that for 700 years feudal Shoguns, who had often scant respect 
for priests, sheared the Mikado of all real power. Nevertheless, in 
some weak but real sense the " Holy Kioto Empire " lived down to 
1868, when many princes of the Imperial blood, like Prince Kitashirakawa 
at Ninnoji, were officiating with shaved heads as imperial incumbents 
of great Tendai and Shingon abbeys at the old capital. It was through 
the early Kioto centuries, however, that the strength of this double 
power ran through society like the fire of a holy wine ; and it was in 
Engi especially that it reached its highest power. There in the heart 
of Kioto to-day, under the roof of an ancient temple gate of Daigo's 
palace, can still be seen the far-away peaks of Hiyei-zan dominating the 
devoted city and testifying eloquently to the pride with which the 
Tendai pope must have looked down upon his Imperial puppet. 

For there were several things that the far-sighted Kwammu forgot 
in laying his wise plans for empire. He had chafed against Koken's 
Nara hierarch, Dokio ; he had resented the cupidity of the Nara 
nobles, who had gradually and surreptitiously neutralized Tenchi's 
fine laws of land distribution to the people. He had intended to rule 
as the new father of a great people relieved from their abuses ; and 
doubtless Dengio was equally sincere in good intentions. But neither 
of them could foresee how the new Chinese ranking of Imperial 
ministers as a court entourage, strengthened with a caste allegiance 
to the theocratic power on the hill, would soon lead to the throttling 
of imperialism with oligarchy. Four estates you may say there were 
the Emperor, the people, the nobles, and the clergy. The Emperor 
and the people should have been strong enough then to build the 
Japanese nation, which was delayed till 1868 ; for the village organi- 
zation of the farmers -and the artisans, for which indeed the Taihori 
laws had been chiefly drafted, was not yet far in abeyance. But 
a working combination of a vast civic aristocracy drawing its wealth 
from country estates with the ramifications of a perfect administration 
would be well-nigh too powerful. 

This aristocracy was vested largely in one vast family, the Fujiwara, 
which had trained its hundreds of collateral houses upon a single grand 



152 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

scale of policy and education. A well managed family in Japan is 
always an imperium in imperio ; and the early history of Japan is largely 
a record of civic, or even civil, struggle between rival houses. Thus 
the Soga family, the first great patrons of Buddhism, had been 
supported by Prince Shotoku in their fight with Moriya. It was only 
a little later that the great minister Kamatori, the reputed founder of 
the Fujiwara, fell into deadly feud with the jealous Soga. It was 
against this very growth of the aristocracy that Tenchi's and Morimune's 
laws had been directed. Nevertheless in Nara times the old land- 
grabbing had crept back and the Fujiwara clan was rising to con- 
siderable wealth and influence. And when Kwammu in his new 
Kioto assembled his courtiers about him into a consolidated cabinet 
with subordinate bureaus and a large officialdom, the scions of the 
populous Fujiwara were there in large numbers, ready to fill the 
posts. Especially had this house been eager to follow all the new 
currents of learning that had filtered in from China and Corea. They 
were trained scholars as well as statesmen ; and now they threw them- 
selves with solid enthusiasm into the union of learning with the personal 
ecstasy of the new mysticism. It was they who became the principal 
pupils of the Tendai hierophants ; they the artists, the poets, the 
musicians, the dancers nay, the Confucians also who should realize 
in their own lives a mingling of the best in both China and Japan. 
They were " aristocrats " in a literal sense. It was a government 
by the best. This is why we call this second great period of 
Japanese civilization, centred at Kioto and lasting down to the twelfth 
century, the Fujiwara epoch. 

But it was not till just before the culminating period of Engi 
that the inner significance of this aristocratic predominance began to 
be felt. The nobles had begun with supporting Kwammu in his 
alliance with the priesthood. It now became clear that the Fujiwara, 
in this alliance, were about to overweigh the Emperor. In 881, 
the head of the Fujiwara house, a man of vast ability and ambition, 
Mototsune, became prime minister, with a strong backing of his 
house in subordinate offices. By 884 his cabinet became so powerful 
that it dethroned the reigning Emperor and put up his son. In 892, 
Mototsune's daughter was married to the Emperor Uda. This was 
the beginning of a series of such marriages, through which the heads 
of the Fujiwara clan became grandfathers of a whole line of Emperors. 



MYSTICAL BUDDHIST ART IN JAPAN 153 

The dangers of this one-sided supremacy were of course apparent to 
the other nobles ; and one of these, Sugawara no Michizane, through 
his talents and learning, which really surpassed the Fujiwaras', rose into 
rival rank. He was the great Chinese scholar of his day a great prose 
writer, a great historian, a great poet in the Chinese style of Tang 
following Rihaku and Omakitsu a great painter, a man of staunch 
integrity, an incorruptible statesman. Such a man really stood in the 
way of Fujiwara ambition ; and through a romantic series of Court 
intrigues he was eventually removed by banishment. His story has 
since entered into many a novel and play, and forms the theme of the 
great panoramic paintings by Nobuzane spoken of in the next chapter. 
His soul has been promoted to the rank of Shinto deity, and he is 
worshipped to-day, under the name of Tenjin, as a sort of Japanese god 
of letters. 

The Fujiwara, from this time onward, really reigned supreme for two 
centuries. And one of their methods of controlling the Emperors was 
in that alliance of the church which urged them as they grew to manhood 
to take holy orders, shave their heads, retire to a monastery and leave 
the young prince to the guidance of his ministers. If a great man he 
might still exert much authority, but only through channels which were 
controlled by the church. This was not quite a new procedure ; but 
as an almost compulsory measure under Fujiwara custom it became a 
new instrument. Uda became the first type of these retired Emperors 
in 889, and was given the complimentary ecclesiastical title of Ho-6 
(that is pope). The real power was of course held by the Hiyei-zan 
prelate. The young Daigo, grandson of Fujiwara Mototsune, was now 
the civil Emperor, and his long reign is both a sign of and establishes the 
Fujiwara domination in its perfect form. Daigo is the great Emperor 
of Engi, and under him the splendour of literature and art rise to their 
zenith. 

In is worth while here to say just a word more about this Fujiwara 
culture. On the physical side it reached its splendour with enormous 
palaces enormous in extent rather than height and fine gardens in a 
style not more than half Chinese. Silks of the richest texture and colour 
were worn in many layers whose edges were tinted into gradations. Gold 
and colours and ivory and bronze and pearl were used to finish the 
interiors. Music became a passion a mixture or alternation of 
Chinese music and Japanese music demanding a department of music 

VOL. I. N 



154 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

with a minister of state at its head, who also supervised the Court 
dances, which were reckoned a part of music. These dances were 
pantomimic, i.e., dramatic, and composed on historical or romantic 
themes. Nobles themselves, and refined Court ladies, at first took part 
in the dancing. Later a chanted text was added, sung by aristocratic 
choruses. Other kindred dances were the Buddhist miracle pantomimes 
already noticed, and the Shinto Matsuri dances, which the nobles also 
affected ; for one of Kobo Daishi's great works had been an effected 
union between Shinto and Buddhism, through which they exchanged 
deities. It was largely through the retention of Shinto pure Japanese 
ideality, nature and family worship that Japan, even in her Chinese 
copying, remained so largely herself. 

In literature, for example, though Chinese poetry was known 
and practised, as by Michizane, the pure well of native speech in 
its polysyllabic sound wealth, its loose verbal construction, and its 
host of little particles, so utterly removed from the solid, trip-hammer 
metre of Chinese bubbled up too copiously for serious soiling. In 
905 the poet Tsurayuki presented to the Engi Emperor the second 
great national anthology, the Kokinshu, in which so many of the 
thousands of supreme masterpieces are by Court ladies and priests. 
Ono no Komachi becomes Japan's romantic Sappho. Narihira plays 
the part of Theocritus, or at least a Byron. The archbishop Henjo 
blends Buddhist ecstasy with pure Japanese nature feeling. From 
these days the Fujiwara lords and ladies were all trained as poets, 
and among the intellectual pastimes of Court ceremonies, parties and 
picnics were minnesinger contests and the capping of verses. 

Prose, too, took on splendid romantic forms, especially in the great 
novels of life, the Monogataris, largely written by the Court ladies. 
Certainly the Geni Monogotari, by the lady Murasaki, is almost the 
most perfect picture of refined contemporary life that the literature 
of any race has left us. Without any deep-laid plot it contrives 
to describe every phase of public and private life, showing especially 
how men and women are almost equally educated and stand on 
terms of perfect social equality. It may seem strange to some that 
any race of Oriental women can ever have been as free as are 
ours to-day. Chinese subordination of women played no part in an 
aristocracy which was training its daughters to an intellectual emulation 
that should prove their fitness to be Empresses. The subjugation of 



MYSTICAL BUDDHIST ART IN JAPAN 155 

women through feudal violence did not supervene till the twelfth 
century. The very individual training of the new Buddhism allowed 
women to essay the spiritual emancipation. Orders of Shingon nuns 
had been founded even by Kobo Daishi. In 990 the Empress 
herself becomes a nun and starts an order of retired female popes, 
parallel with the shaved emperors. It seemed a natural process in 
this naively refined society that men and women who had plunged 
in youth into social and domestic joys and responsibilities should 
leave the emoluments to their children and devote their waning 
strength to the more inward ecstasies of divine vision. Thus, 
throughout all their strange lives Fujiwara men and women worked 
on equal terms and indulged most romantic intercourse. All these 
thousand involutions are revealed to us in the pages of the 
Monogotaris, through which we can know the Engi age as minutely 
as we can know the material side of Tempei through the Shosoin 
Museum. 

But, after all, the core of this wonderful life is chiefly explained 
by its religious enthusiasm. Recent Christian visitors to Japan have 
observed of this remarkable race that, in spite of modern Confucian 
agnosticism, they seem to be a people " on fire with religion." This 
passionate idealism nobly displayed itself in the sacrifices of the 
recent Russian war. It was the same divine flame, but reddened a 
thousand years ago with a stronger Buddhist tinge, that made Fuji- 
wara lords and ladies feel even the most gorgeous human life to 
be only a threshold for an actual spiritual life. This intermingling 
of social and spiritual interests sounds a key-note. To make and 
administer sound laws, to effect hospital, charitable, and university 
organization, to play a bird-like part in the variegated paradises of 
court and villa, to beautify the person, and flash poetry as foun- 
tains do water was only to play naturally what the gods wished 
done upon the hardened circumference of heaven, for, after all, the 
earth is only an outlying province, and the very best of the flesh- 
bound soul is in touch with the central molten life of Paradise. 
Thus men do their most menial functions in the very eyes of 
gods, and there becomes practically no difference between a 
palace and a temple. The two architectures are the same. The 
lovely little shrine of Biodoin at Uji, which, dating from the next 
century, is almost the sole architectural Fujiwara remainder, exhibits 

N 2 



156 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

in its corridors and pavilion wings the type of a private villa. Its 
interior finish of black lacquer inlaid with plates of gold, silver, 
ivory and pearl realises on earth the flashing splendour of heavenly 
mansions. You come out of the palace robed in trailing purple 
mixed with trailing hair, and you enter the palace with the shining 
pate and the girded Keisa of a nun. This double life permeates 
the habits and thought of all classes down to the very people. The 
temple worship of our day, the processions, the banners, the incense, 
the breathless exaltation of the shrine, all these are only ghostly 
echoes of the religious passion of Fujiwara. 

To realize the ecstasies of the inner vision that alternated with 
the outer, we must realize the individuality of this worship. It was 
no mere force of sacrament, no sentimental evangel of brotherhood. 
The young soul had to win the spurs of its knighthood alone, in 
struggle, in effort to feel and see, in invocation to the gods to tear 
his heart open alone before the altar in his cell, or his own chamber 
shrine. To pray to the spirit beside your bed was as much a part 
of life as to sleep. But you entered the holy presence naked, with 
bared motive, with discounted pretensions. Some one of the great 
Bodhisattwa was selected by your preceptor as your most fitting 
guardian presence, and to him, or her, you made your first trembling 
prayers, sniffing the rich smoke of incense, learning to tinkle in time 
your gilded bell, and twisting your fingers into the magnetic language 
of the in. You gaze into the white, round mirror on which is 
painted in Sanskrit the golden breathing " ah-h ! " and you watch 
while its surface deliquesces, expands to an infinite crystal sphere, in 
which floats the living soul of the deity you have invoked Kwannon, 
perhaps, who now is so white that she burns out the dross in you ; 
or Jizo, who melts you into the torrent of his own pity ; or 
Amida, who lets you sit as calm in his sun as if you were an 
atom of helium ; or Aizu, who kindles your passion till it bursts 
and reveals itself as no-passion ; or Fudo, who ties you to the stake, 
and lights the pyre, and cuts out your heart, and you sip in the 
glorious pain as if it were a holy draft. These and many more you 
will see to-day, as you travel through Japan, standing as statues, or 
niched as painted altar-pieces, in the side chapels of monasteries, under 
some wayside shed, or still in the chambers of the old-fashioned. 
Such a motley collection of deities that have glared to the prayers of 







WATERFALL, 
Kanawoka. 



MYSTICAL BUDDHIST ART IN JAPAN 157 

a hundred generations is that which I once saw in 1884 in a chapel 
at Udzumasa, since destroyed. Here you might see the whole 
Pantheon, seated or standing, gilt or in colour, and before them the 
small, square lacquered altar, with silver mirror and gilded apex, 
and four candlesticks which burn lights of four colours, and the small 
square mat, where you might sit and make of yourself a purged 
circle immune of the devil. 

I say and illustrate all this, not only because we cannot otherwise 
quite realize the Fujiwara life, in which all men were great priests, but 
also because, in this mutual heightening of the inner and outer vision 
is found just the very key to the soul of Fujiwara art. The art of 
the priests in the temples went on much as in the inceptive days of 
Kobo Daishi ; but now in Engi arose for the first time, among the 
same educated nobles who danced to flutes and sang lyrics to flowers, 
a class of lay masters who gave their whole professional career to 
painting, and that chiefly to Buddhist painting. The founder of this 
new Court order, and the founder of the first professional family of 
artists, was Kose no Kanawoka, a courtier who was specialized for 
painting by Daigo, as Godoshi had been in China by Genso. It has 
been customary for writers upon Japanese artists, whether native or 
alien, to commence their account with Kanawoka as the " father " of 
the art. But as we see him he is only the central spirit of the 
second stage of the second great period of the art. Unfortunately 
myth has been busy with his name, and it is difficult to penetrate 
back to his personality. No doubt he was the friend of Daigo, 
Michizane, Narihira, and the Lady Ono no Komachi. No doubt he 
shared in all the refinements and passionate enthusiasms of his day. It 
is difficult also to identify his work, which has come down through later 
troubled ages as hardly more than a tradition, quite as the Tang 
Godoshi has come. And in the same way we must try to identify his 
work by approximation. We can see the kind of excellence that the 
whole Kose school , arrived at. A large number of very fine paintings 
have been preserved in temples from the Fujiwara age, and are mostly 
ascribed to Godoshi by their custodians. If we follow the clue of 
regarding the very best of these as our best available standard, we shall 
come the nearest to the truth. For it will not avail here, any more 
than with the relics of Tang art, to throw away all tradition. As we 
shall see in a later chapter, the tradition of reproducing and judging 



158 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

the mystical Buddhist painting finally passed into the hands of the late 
Tosa school, and from this to its branch, the Sumiyoshi ; just as the 
professional criticisms of Chinese work fell into the hands of Sesshu, 
and to the early middle and late Kano. The last Sumiyoshi, Hirokata, 
who died in 1885, was for years my teacher in Tosa and Buddhist 
painting, as Yeitoku had been in the Chinese and the Kano. It was 
from Hirokata that I derive the traditional views of a thousand years. 

What sources had Kanawoka from which to derive the elements 
of his style ? On the one hand he possessed the two priestly styles of 
Tang, coming down through Kobo and Chisho Daishi's : that is the 
delicate Mandara style, and the large wired portrait style. He had the 
inspiration which came from the large architecture and the brilliant 
decoration of his day. He was a spacer. We have it on record that 
he was chief among the landscape gardeners of Engi. Moreover, the 
break-up of Tang itself was bringing in refugees from the Eastern 
Chinese provinces, who doubtless imported some traces of the contem- 
porary styles of later Tang. In 935, during the five short dynasties, 
men from the coast cities of Go and Etsu arrived with what is called 
in the record " tribute." This may be only a phrase flourish, or it 
may mean that in the distracted partitioning of the Tang empire, 
those ancient seats which centuries before, in the troublous decay of 
Han, had furnished immigrants in a quite parallel way, were even 
anxious to transfer their allegiance from petty tyrants to the great 
island Emperor. Again in 957 commissioners from Go arrive in Kioto. 
This is only three years before the happy reuniting of the empire under 
Sung ; and it may well be that some of the earliest Sung artists had 
their work represented in importations of that time. But by this time 
Kanawoka had probably left his artistic inheritance to his sons, Kanatada 
and Ahimi. 

The more important question is how far had the great work of 
early Tang yes, even the very central work of Godoshi himself 
became familiar to the Japanese of Daigo's day. It had apparently not 
been closely influential upon Kobo Daishi. But constant intercourse 
between Kioto and central Tang must have brought in the thick strong 
pen style of Godoshi along with the poetry of Rihaku and the prose 
of Kantaishi. The very comprehensive scholarship implied by such a 
career as Michizane's can hardly have been unfamiliar with such 
an important ornament of Genso's Court. Rather are we inclined to 




PAINTING IN THE GODOSHI STYLE of Kanawoka of one 
of the Shi Ten O, formerly at Todaiji, Nara, now in 
the Fenollosa-Weld Collection, Boston. 



Of THE 
UNIVERSITY Of ILL: 



MYSTICAL BUDDHIST ART IN JAPAN 159 

believe that Kanawoka deliberately undertook to play something of the 
Godoshi part to his master of Engi ; and to him we are disposed to 
ascribe the full naturalization of a strong Godoshi penmanship, and 
of a strong Godoshi-like realization of his subject. Two theories about 
Kanawoka's style have apparently conflicted in recent years : one that 
it was most minute in short the very hair-thick gold-lined style which 
we know to have been prominent a century later with Yeishin Sozu ; 
the other that of the Sumiyoshi's, that the characteristic Kanawokas 
have a fine thickening Tang line, a little more wiry than Godoshi's 
but much more masculine than Tang ninth-century work. With the 
latter theory I agree, merely adding that it is not unlikely that Kanawoka 
may at times have personally effected a sort of synthesis between these 
two systems. Painting altar pieces as he did for Shingon temples, he 
probably thinned his line without making it effeminate ; but indulging 
in warriors, battles, and scenes from Hell, he probably employed the 
most that he knew of Godoshi's powerful lead-line stroke. There is 
also reason to believe that he knew even of the ink monochrome style 
of Godoshi and Omakitsu. 

Of the pieces which may be reckoned as possible Kanawokas are 
several strong seated Fudos, with his two doji or attendant boys. Of 
one of these, a copy by Sumiyoshi is here given in outline, showing the 
Kanawoka lead-lines. Another, in which there is possibly later handling, 
is the fine Fudo that was first noticed by Dr. Anderson of England at 
Daishoji, in Shiba of Tokio in 1879, anc ^ which is now in the Fenollosa 
collection at Boston.* The beautiful standing portrait of Shotoku Taishi 
as a youth, owned by the temple Nennaji of Kioto, has always been 
believed to be one of the authentic pieces. It expresses a nobility of 
fine line, colour and expression not to be found in later Tosa work. 
The great painting of lotoses and wild ducks, which strangely enough 
has from old days been ascribed to Godoshi by the traditions of Horiuji, 
its owner, is a most interesting piece of relatively secular work and 
in almost pure Chinese style. The lotoses are as finely drawn as if 
in the throne of an altar-piece. It is possible that we have here the 
direct influence upon Kanawoka of contemporary Chinese artists of the 
five dynasties, such as Joki. The relatively free-lined work of Kanawoka 
is well illustrated by the beautiful Monju formerly in Koyasan, and 
now owned by Mr. Freer. The ink school is probably represented by 

* This Fudo was formerly owned by priests at Kamakura and sold by them to Daishoji. 



160 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

the broad strokes and clouds of the great thunder gods and dragons 
owned by the Anju-in, temple of Bizen, of Kuni Tomi Village. 
But what I call the Godoshi style of Kanawoka is finely shown in the 
large and unfortunately much-defaced paintings of nearly life-size 
Shi Ten O, formerly one of the great treasures of Todaiji in Nara, 
and now in possession of the art museum in Boston (Fenollosa 
collection). A head of one of these is here shown, which exhibits the 
crumbly touch of the broad lead lines, and suggests the deep Titian- 
like colour of the powerful face. The great sweep of the draperies 
into the scalloped edges of the Tang cloud is like the great 
Tang-like militant statues of Nanyendo. It was this phase of the 
Kanawoka style which was carried over to the Shingon temple of 
Daigoji in Yamashina, where I found the porcelain head, and where 
a great school of powerful Buddhist painting in the Tang style was 
inaugurated. 

Of Kanawoka's sons a few ascribable designs are extant. To Ahimi 
was given the fine Chinese Rakan in the Sumiyoshi collection of copies; 
and Kanetada may be the author of the great Bisjamon, photo- 
graphed from the set of the twelve deva in Koriuji of Kioto. 
Another Bisjamon, of identical touch in the draperies, but of stronger 
Godoshi-ish drawing in the red devil under foot, is in the collection 
at Boston. By him too is probably the fine Jizo brought by Mr. 
Wakai to Paris, and reproduced in M. Gonse's " L'Art Japonais." 
This was formerly in the pope's temple of Enriakuji on Hiyei-zan. 
This grouping of the twelve devas is a new Buddhist subject brought 
in with the Shingon sect by Kobo Daishi, and soon popularised in 
Japan. Many of our old friends appear here in other dress, as this 
same Bisjamon, the Sun and Moon spirits, and the deva of Fire and 
Water. The pictures or statues of these twelve are required on the 
occasion of a baptism in the Shingon sect ; also a screen is required, 
which shows an old-fashioned coloured landscape, the idea apparently 
being to sit in the presence of Nature. One of the oldest of such 
screens, now at Toji, may possibly be by Kanetada. It shows hills 
and trees in solid green, the trees drooping in the old Chinese Tartar 
style, something between the trees of the Shosoin screen and later 
Tosa landscape. This quality of landscape, hardened a little by gold, 
is also found in works by the grandson, Kose Kanemochi. The Benten 
in Boston is one of these. In the garden background we probably 




ONE OF THE HELL SERIES, 

"EMMA'S JUDGMENT." By Kanawoka. 
Copied by Hirotaka Sumiyoshi. 



OF THE 

UNIVERSITY or ILL 



MYSTICAL BUDDHIST ART IN JAPAN 161 

see something of the style of Kanawoka's gardens. Kanemochi also 
is said to have left one or two secular designs of Fujiwara life. 

The great-grandson of Kanawoka, fourth of the Kose line, and the 
best known after Kanawoka, put more delicacy, grace and realism into 
his work. His Jizos are very delicate and noble in feeling. (One 
in Boston.) His Monjus and Fugens are in many places. In short, 
his style becomes an imitable type a sort of fixed Kose type for 
the Fujiwara remainder, in which it is hard to distinguish the master 
from his followers. Of his semi-secular works is the screen painted 
with scenes of Court dancing in colours. The musicians in gorgeous 
costume sit with drum, fife and sho-o at the back before a heavy 
curtain. A large mass of Hiyei-zan monks, muffled with white to 
their mouths, stand about on the right. Doubtless they are fully 
armed beneath their free grey robes. There are ferocity and deter- 
mination in the small exposed parts of their faces. In the centre 
dances a young boy, dressed probably in ancient Chinese costume, 
and with a long white train curving on the ground. But the greatest 
work of Hirotaka is the remainder of what was once a series of 60 
large paintings showing the doings of beings in " The Ten Worlds," 
still kept at Raikoji of Sakamoto. These are very varied in subject, 
for the scenery includes Heaven, Hell, the animal world, the world of 
deva, of elemental spirits, of ordinary humanity, etc. This appears 
a splendid chance for realistic work. The best of those which 
have not been lost or destroyed deal with scenes from the many parts 
of the Buddhist Hell. The splendour of fire, the gorgeousness of the 
panorama, where green and red devils actually are shown keeping up 
the fires by shovelling in great black lumps that can be no other 
than coal, perhaps reflect a weak tradition of what Godoshi did with 
a similar subject on the walls of Changan. The piece which we here 
reproduce is the upper portion of the judgment hall, where Emma, 
the king of Hell, sits horrible, red-faced, listening to the incriminating 
evidence dished up for him by clerks and attorneys. The scene 
quite mirrors an ancient Chinese Tang court of criminal justice. 
Below the steps is the magic mirror which reflects truly the heart 
of the accused, whatever be his verbal defence. Here one of the 
attorneys points in glee to its testimony of murder, while the victim 
crouches at the foot of the steps. Below is the courtyard where 
condemned prisoners are being dragged away or tortured. The style 



1 62 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

of drawing and colouring here is a fine Chinese of Tang, translated 
into a growing Kose formalism. In the scenes of human life and 
strife, such as for instance the armoured knights in the battles of 
Hell, the movements of horses and the fleeing of peasants, we have 
a first suggestion of the kind of moving composition which will 
become familiar to us in the next chapter as " Tosa." But the 
movement of the brush is much stiffer than that of Tosa, the limbs 
and armour being as precisely drawn in fine modulated line as if it 
were part of a hieratic altar-piece. 

The tenth century went out without any decisive modification of the 
Fujiwara regime at Kioto. The Emperors were mostly puppets, the 
Empresses mostly the daughters of the dominant house. The type of 
culture was the relic of what had been learned from Tang more than a 
century before. For Tang had now long fallen, and the Sung come in ; 
but as yet the Sung, far more restricted in empire that the Tang, was 
more concerned in consolidating its conquests at home than in com- 
municating with outlying peoples. The danger of such a state is a 
threatening stagnation. Poetry begins to show weakness and repetition. 
The Monogataris are poorer ; painting more effeminate. The growing 
luxury of the ruling caste is breeding personal ambition and mutual 
jealousy. Revolts, like the rebellion of Masakado, have to be put down. 
The priestly estate is becoming unruly and jealous of its pampered 
allies. How carefully was maintained the vicious circle of the Fujiwara 
tyranny is proved by its prohibition of all intercourse with the new 
Sung powers of China. It was afraid of new and liberal ideas. The 
Sung men were reported to be free-thinkers. On the one hand, in 1034, 
Japanese students in the Kioto University were being forced through 
examinations in the Confucian classics. By 1069 Chinese students in 
the Kaifong University of Sung were being prohibited from the use of 
Confucian classics by order of the great reformer Oansaki. What an 
anomalous change of positions. One of the Japanese nobles, curious 
as to the other world's doings, attempted to escape to China in 1047, 
was apprehended, and banished for his audacity to the island of Sado. 

But nature never stands still, and it is hard to make man do so 
either. 

Forces were already at work to disrupt Fujiwara, such as the gradual 
rise of a military class. Armies had often been raised and officered 
by Fujiwara partisans ; but as these armies became a standing force to 




A BUDDHIST TRINITY : AMIDA WITH ATTENDANT BODHISATTWA, 
KWANNON AND SEisHi. By Yeishin Sozu. 



**< 



MYSTICAL BUDDHIST ART IN JAPAN 163 

operate against the barbarians of both North and South, their general, 
though nobly loyal, came to possess hereditary power. The Taira family 
of generals had been founded as far back as 889. The rebel Masakado 
was a Taira. The Minamoto family of generals came about 100 years 
later. 

The complicated and expensive ritual of the dominant Buddhist sects, 
and the growing worldliness and ambition of Enriakuji, led in the 
early eleventh century to several attempts at simplifying the religion 
making it more popular, bringing it home to the hearts of all men. 

This was the work of several Tendai priests like Eikwan, who started 
the movement to make the worship of Amida dominant, a movement 
which eventually became a separate organization in the Jodo (free land) 
sect. The paradise of Amida was no new thing in either China or 
Japan. The whole miracle play of Taimadera had been based upon 
it in the Nara days. But earlier representations had been woven or 
painted in elaborate colours only. Now the mystic vision of the reformers 
wished to discard the elaborate rituals of Fudo and Kwannon and focus 
all force into the invocation of the central Amida, the Buddha of 
boundless light, who was seen in ecstasy as a form of dazzling light, 
surrounded by a gorgeous company of Bosatsu, all equally luminous. 
Such light curiously like what the neo-Platonists of Alexandria say of 
the luminosity of their vision was too intense for colour ; nothing but 
the splendour of gold could suggest it gold not only in the flesh, but 
in the draperies down to the last detail of pattern. The movement 
was only an intensifying of the mystic tendencies of the age ; but it 
led to something of a new departure in art. The growing effeminacy 
of Tang line could now be erected into a new canon ; for brushwork 
cannot thicken freely lines made with gold paint. Moreover, the 
method was rather of applying the gold in finely cut strips by glue, 
or of painting fine lines in glue and affixing the gold leaf. The figures 
were to be rendered more worshipful by an incredible suggestion of 
delicacy, rather than of power through delineation. It was in some 
sense a return to suggestions of the fine line gold Mandara figures of 
early Tang ; but those had always been done with a brush filled with 
gold pigment, and were hardly more than outline. In another sense, 
it was a kind of return to the delicate hair lines of Nara painting. In 
any case, it was a distinct reaction against the alien Chinese feeling of 
early Fujiwara, a mixing of national elements, a school of real Japanese 



1 64 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

art arising at this end of the Fujiwara regime. It is this which has 
been in later days dignified by a significant name, the Yamato school. 
It must not be supposed, however, that there was any violent change, 
or that Chinese elements were really discarded. Japan never makes a 
complete change of any sort. She always recovers herself and unites 
organically past with present. 

The new school of art was really led by another great priest, 
Yeishin Sozu, who possessed at once a childlike belief in the truth 
of his own visions and a pictorial genius adequate to fixing them 
as a revelation for others. In this respect he is not unlike our 
own Fra Angelico of San Marco in Florence. And, curiously 
enough, their almost identical visions of the angel host are drawn 
in lines of similar delicacy and dominated with gold. Yeishin generally 
used more gold than Angelico ; though other artists of his day mingled 
colour in nearly Florentine proportions. 

Examples of Yeishin's work are not so rare as Kanawoka's. 
His favourite subjects are the Amida golden trinity, Amida's descent 
in glory Amida's paradise the happy life of the musical angels. 
One that was probably quite new with him is the appearance of 
the Amida trinity as colossal suns rising over the edge of the 
Eastern mountains. There is a superstition yet existing in Japan 
that on a certain night in August true believers in Amida can see 
this effect with their mortal eyes ; and it is said that in remote 
places crowds sit up the night for it gazing with possibly self- 
hypnotic eyes into the luminous East. 

A fine front Amida trinity by Yeishin is here reproduced. 
The attendant Bodhisattwa, Kwannon and Seishi, bend graciously at 
either side of his feet, as if to invite his arrival. The gold is so 
evenly distributed in microscopic pattern as to present in small 
photographs an almost continuous blaze. A fine radiation of light 
from Amida's body is rendered in thin gold pigment over a dark 
blue ground. Another fine trinity, two-thirds turned, is in Boston. 
Chionin in Kioto is one of the great temple centres of this Jodo 
worship and possesses several fine examples ; as the great descent 
of Amida and his angels in an expanding fan-shaped cloud sweep- 
ing across the face of Hiyei-zan, spotted with cherry blooms, toward 
the little pavilion in the corner where Yeishin has naively depicted 
himself as sitting. It is a vision of great originality in spacing, 




SUNRISE AMIDA. By Yeishin Sozu. 



OF THE 
UNIVERSITY OF IU 



MYSTICAL BUDDHIST ART IN JAPAN 165 

and of a new splendour in gold and colour, wherein the Chinese element 
is almost obliterated. The Japanese foliage of the mountain side is 
drawn realistically, in a style half-way between Kanawoka's gardens 
and Tosa landscape. The angel panels, hinged for shrine doors, 
remind us strongly of the musical angels of Angelico on the gold 
doors at the Ufizzi. Gracious figures they are, of childlike happiness 
and innocence. The most splendid sunrise Amida is the famous 
triptych of panels in Kin-kui-kio-miyoj i Kurodani of Kioto. Here 
the pure oval type of Yeishin at his best is conspicuous. To the 
actual cord that issues from the Amida's gold breast many Emperors, 
famous warriors and great priests have died clinging. Before its 
majestic purity even the foreign spectator is hushed into a kind of 
awe. Another sunrise with more elements of colour is in Zenrinji, 
Kioto. Here the two Bodhisattwa have already crossed the mountains 
to welcome from the front the rising Amida ; and a whole congre- 
gation of spirits, led by two small queenly figures in the foreground, 
throng through the valleys below. 

This new movement in art led, about 1000, to the separation and firm 
independent founding of two professional Buddhist schools that would 
otherwise have remained branches of the Kose. I refer to the Kasuga 
and Takuma families. The early work of the latter is not very 
easily identified ; but we know that the whole interior of the lovely 
shrine at Biodoin, already referred to, and which was built in 1051, 
was painted by Takuma Tamanari. These show visions of life in 
Paradise, but are mostly defaced. The real splendour is in the 
unspoiled ceiling and baldachin, whose inlaying has been already 
described as typical Fujiwara luxury. 

The Kasuga school, said to be continuous in family blood with 
the late Tosa, was founded by Motomitsu, whose work seems so 
closely affiliated with both Hirotaka's and Yeishin's that we are 
almost bound to believe him at first a Kose pupil who learned closely 
to follow the vision-seeing priest. The family name Kasuga probably 
denotes that he officiated as Court painter to the much patronized 
Shinto shrine of that name in Nara. A fine example is his enthroned 
Kwannon in Toji, where the halo is made up of inlaid lozenges of 
gold. The delicious minute tracery of his gold draperies, as also of 
Yeishin Sozu's, is exemplified in the fine Amida of the panel triptych 
at Boston. The gorgeous twelve paintings of the Juni Ten at Jingoji 



1 66 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

of Takawo one of Kobo's picturesque foundations I have ascribed 
to him. Here the colour, gorgeous yellow-greens and oranges spotted 
over deeper oranges and purples, is a new expanded glorification of the 
sort of colouring found on the new Tempei painted altar-pieces. Here 
there is again exemplified that semi-conscious return to Nara art as a 
pre-Tang native type suggested by such names as " Yamato " and 
" Kasuga." Motomitsu is also said to be the author of a secular 
painting of wrestlers Kose-ish, and of no great merit. 

But one of his most striking works is the unique profile view 
across some of the pavilions of Amida's gardens, owned by Mr. Freer. 
Here we get an added suggestion of the light Fujiwara architecture ; 
here outlined in gold. The little gold figures of the trinities sit about 
on the floors receiving as guests their angel friends, or work and teach 
at the open casement windows of the upper storeys. Now they take a 
walk down the fine curves of the garden, or stoop at the edge of a 
pond to pluck the gold lotoses. 

Others of the Kasuga family are the priest Chinkai noted for his 
Monjus the inheriting son Takayoshi, and the grandson Takachika. 
By Takayoshi, or some unidentified pupil of Yeishin, are the best of 
the great gold and coloured Paradises owned by Chionin. The style is 
not so free and na'ive full of unexpected line feeling as with either 
Yeishin or Motomitsu. The crowded figures are more based upon the 
hieratic Nara traditional composition, which was itself based upon a 
pre-Tang original of about the year 600. 

The third generation, Takachika, shews a decidedly weak effeminacy 
in even this late Fujiwara movement. His line is reduced to the 
finest hair's-breadth, his faces are like doll's, their eyes and mouths being 
drawn with single microscopic lines. Yet the gold in his altar-pieces, 
and the over-delicate colours, as in his Fugen at Boston seem more 
like a film deposited by the breath than by any kind of handwork. 
The famous illustrations to the Monogotaris by him, showing a secular 
painting of Fujiwara life in its last stage of weakness, are more cele- 
brated for their na'ivet5 and historical interest, and for their delicacy of 
colour, than for the beauty of their figure drawing. It is a pure 
convention which makes the thin black stream of a woman's hair flow 
down the sides of these dolls ; but their charm was great enough to 
influence the late Tosa art of such a remote age as Tokugawa, and 
even the art of Korin. In short, the decay of Fujiwara art implies a 




o 

ffl 



Id 

si 

2 
Id 
H 



MYSTICAL BUDDHIST ART IN JAPAN 167 

complete break-up of the tradition of at least a noble form and pro- 
portion that came from early Tang. Now, as in Takachika, the figures 
may be but seven heads high ; in contemporary Takuma they may 
rise to eleven and twelve. The Chinese key even to the Japanese 
efflorescence is lost. 

But before closing this chapter it is necessary to refer to a very 
interesting revival of sculpture which accompanied the late Fujiwara 
renaissance of Yeishin in painting. Of course, sculpture, the pre- 
dominant art of the Nara age, had never wholly died away, for there 
was always some demand for wooden altar-pieces. These at first, as we 
have seen, tended to follow Tang models. Later, during Engi, we 
find occasional carved Buddhas based evidently upon the semi-Japanese 
proportions of Kanawoka. But these are exceptional ; since the very 
inwardness of the new visional worship led to small altars before which 
the neophyte dreamed, entirely different from the vast spectacular 
platforms covered with statuary of the Nara day. In Shingon and 
Tendai still more in Jodo the altar tends to be only a separate 
receptacle for a central closed shrine, with space for candlesticks and 
vases. Even these became relegated to a table in front of the shrinking 
altar. So no room was left for large statues. However, in the days 
of the Yeishin revival there was a thought to get back to Nara 
sculpture, though in smaller pieces ; to have a Yamato school in statues 
also ; and elaborate altars were prepared with smoothly carved gold 
Amidas, to take the place, at times, of the painted altar panels. A 
great sculptor too arose, contemporary with Hirotaka and Motomitsu, 
who lent genius to the school, namely Jocho, who left behind him a 
tradition parallel with the waning Kasuga. Jocho is the first great 
sculptor of lay origin, as Kanawoka was the first professional painter. 
Though he went back to Nara for some of his types, he modified 
them, no doubt to conform with the more rounded proportions of the 
deities painted by Yeishin. Typical of his work is the profile Amida. 
It is dumpy and sleek as compared with Yakushiji bronzes, but sweetly 
peaceful and sleepy. It is well to note here that the great gold 
Amida statue in the centre of the Hoodo of Biodoin, as well as the 
Gothic flame halo all covered with gold is the work of Yeishin 
Sozu, working as sculptor in the style of Jocho. The fine set of small 
militant figures, imitated with changes from eighth-century Yakushi 
generals, and kept in the Tokondo of Kofukuji, is by Jocho. In 



1 68 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

the best of these is seen some of the finest action in Japanese art. 
The general in helmet gazing down his arrow to test its straightness 
is almost as fine as the clay Shitenno of Kaidendo. In the fine pro- 
portion and action of these figures we see reflected the best features 
of Kose drawing, derived from Kanawoka. Still more in the manner 
of Hirotaka is the fine carved pocket shrine with opening covers 
showing in high relief Monju riding sidewise on his lion. This is, 
perhaps, by a pupil of Jocho. Another one of the very late Jocho-ish 
sculptures is the violent action of a stamping devil with a spear. 

Just here we should perhaps notice typical Fujiwara bronze work in 
the mirrors with fine flower and butterfly patterns and the inlaid lacquer 
of stiff scroll design. There the gleaming plates of pearl well illustrate 
on a small scale Fujiwara interior decoration. Other wooden utensils 
of the day are painted in similar scrolls. 



CHAPTER IX. 

FEUDAL ART IN JAPAN. 
Kamakura The Tosa School. 

IF Hegel's theory that all forms of existence tend to pass into 
their opposites needed historic confirmation, a better example could 
not be found than what happened to Japanese society in the twelfth 
century. It is as if a cataclysm had suddenly set a new Japan at 
the antipodes of the old. The revolution of 1868 which destroyed 
the Feudal system was more rapid indeed, but not more decisive 
than the one of seven hundred years earlier that inaugurated it. 

Yet, as in all such strangest extremes of change, the causes were 
natural, weighty and cumulative. No phase or school of art in 
human society, however beautiful, but contains within itself the germs 
of its own destruction. The longer and finer it has been, the more 
violent becomes the disruption, the more striking the reaction. So 
with the ultra-refined aristocratic idealism of Fujiwara : in spite of 
its beauty, its culture, its power, its cunningly devised alliance of the 
ruling estates, it could not master, tame or fully allow for that 
unruly demon of selfishness in man, who when he finds forms 
inconvenient incontinently smashes them. With all its benefits to the 
land its proposed peace, its unique enlightenment this regime had 
been, after all, the selfish aggrandizement of a single noble clan. So 
long as great men could rule that clan it bade fair to rule the world. 
But if as the clan expanded dissensions should arise among its 
members its power would quickly totter. As a fact, some small 
dissensions began as far back as the tenth century. In 934 Fujiwara 
Sumitomo had revolted against his fellows, but had been quickly put 
down. Through the rest of the tenth and through most of the 
eleventh centuries the system reigned supreme. It had to encounter, 
VOL. I. o 



i/o EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

however, the growing opposition of the religious estate. The priests 
of Enriakuji, forming an army in themselves, sometimes came down 
to the Kioto civil court to interfere and threaten. The causes of 
dissension were religious as well, and there were battles between the 
hooded monks of Nara and Otsu. In 1113 the temple-castle of the 
Tendai popes upon the hill declared war upon Kioto, but suffered 
defeat. In 1143 the Nara priests, following the cue of one of the 
Fujiwara factions, attacked and burned Enriakuji. The Enriakuji 
armies retorted by burning the entire city of Otsu. 

The whole first half of the twelfth century was thus filled with omens 
of decay and disaster in Kioto. The Fujiwara factions, divided hope- 
lessly, called in not only the mountain priests, with swords hidden 
under their robes, but undertook to throw the Imperial estate into the 
melting pot by setting up rival emperors as figure-heads for each ; thus 
splitting the whole nation with the crevasse of a divided loyalty. This 
happened in 1157, and it was now necessary for the standing armies 
and their generals, who heretofore had held themselves loyal to the 
Fujiwara civil ministers and the Imperial seal which they wielded, to 
choose sides. In fact the Fujiwara of both sides, enervated by centu- 
ries of luxurious and peaceful living, were far from erecting themselves 
into adequate warriors. They were rather like the astute politicians of 
fifteenth century Italian cities, who employed mercenaries to do their 
fighting. And it now, indeed, became a matter of life and death to the 
leaders who could offer the largest bribes to the ablest generals. In the 
great civil war of three years that ensued called the Hogen Heiji 
war both sides fought with the ferocity of rankling family feuds. 
Kioto became a cockpit, with the centre of operations now on the flanks 
of Hiyie-zan, now in the Western side of the valley. The palaces, the 
wealth, the books, the temples, the treasures of art the luxurious and 
aesthetic institutions that had accumulated through peaceful centuries 
were now almost as suddenly and utterly swept away as was San 
Francisco in her three terrible days of earthquake and fire. 

The sanguinary quality of these campaigns and the nature of govern- 
ment power which soon built itself upon the ruins of the Fujiwara has 
now to be explained in the new factor of the standing military, which 
would seem to have had no legitimate footing in the complicated circle 
of the oligarchy. In early Nara days there had existed no separate class 
of soldiers. From the age of Jimmu Tenno downward the army was 



FEUDAL ART IN JAPAN 171 

theoretically the whole nation, just as it is with the semi-savage hordes 
of the Pacific Islands. The emperor was their natural general first of 
all a great war chief who only gradually, and hardly before Kwammu's 
time too, took on much of Chinese Imperial isolation. It was the very 
cordon of Fujiwara courtiers drawn so tightly about the emperor that 
quite obscured his military function and made it necessary, for purposes 
of local campaigns, to appoint substitutes in the persons of national 
generals, subordinate to their civil administration. As vast cities rose, 
too, with the industrial classes; and as the fields of disturbance wars 
chiefly waged against the half-subdued tribes of North and South 
became located farther and farther from the populous centres, it became 
imperative to organise standing armies under these generals, who should 
live permanently near the frontiers, without the necessity of difficult 
marches through hundreds of miles. 

Such a general indeed had been appointed in the very first years of 
the new Heian capital, by the need of making a tremendous effort to 
dislodge the still powerful Ainos of the East, who held the mountain 
passes about the base of Fujiyama. It was these primitive inhabitants 
of the land who had been heirs of many of the Pacific traditions and 
arts, and in the already conquered provinces had contributed relics and 
names to their western congeners with whom they amalgamated. But 
few dwellers of the Yamato race Corean, Malay or both, and perhaps 
at first not so superior to or different from their despised predecessors 
yet lived in the dark East and North. So Tamura Maro received for 
the first time the title of" Sei-i Tai Shogun," "great barbarian-conquering 
general," which title was held by the Tokugawa Shoguns at Yedo, down 
to 1868. He conducted a successful campaign for eight years, in the 
course of which he seized and opened the great Hakone mountain high- 
way to the fertile plains of the North East. One of the great dramas 
of the later No is based upon his deeds. 

In 854 and 857 there was further trouble with barbarians on both 
the North and the South. The inhabitants of Lower Kiushiu and even 
the island of Tsushima were in some kind of revolt. It does not 
clearly appear who these Southern barbarians, often spoken of, were. 
That they had affiliation with people from China seems clear from the 
fact that their armies were sometimes reinforced from the mainland. 
They were probably the remains of primitive races, officered by Chinese 
refugees or pirates. Even hostile parties from Corea are said to have 

O 2 



T/2 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

come over in 894. There was fighting with Coreans again in 935. 
By 994 the troublesome bands in various parts of the empire are called, 
in the annals, "Robber Western Barbarians" ; they invaded Japan in 999. 
In 1 020 it is expressly said that barbarians from the South East of 
China attacked the province of Satsuma. In 1091 the enemies against 
which the armies proceed are officered by Japanese generals who have 
revolted from Fujiwara allegiance. In 1135 the enemies are spoken of 
as "pirates." And by this time, too, the Northern armies were encamped 
far up beyond the plain of Musashi in the mountain depths (Oka). 
It was the possession of the Eastern plain, doubtless the granary of 
Japan which overthrew the Aino power, made it possible for the 
soldiers in the intervals of fighting to till the fertile lands and store 
up supplies for later campaigns, and eventually gave the preponderating 
power to the Northern generals. 

But the Fujiwaras had been shrewd enough to create several families 
of generals, each to be held in a sort of clan bond with hostages at 
Kioto, and whose individual members should enjoy only limited com- 
mands. Prince Takamochi had been given the family name of " Taira," 
as far back as 889. Taira generals descended from him ruled in the 
North. One of them, Masakado, who held court near the present site 
of Yedo, then a wild swamp in a province but recently conquered 
by Tamura, became so impressed with his far and independent sources 
of wealth that he actually revolted, not only against his Fujiwara 
overlords, but against the Mikado, calling himself an independent 
Emperor. This is said to be the only case of such supreme treason 
in Japanese history ; a fact probably due to the enormous advantage 
of the Mikado's divine (Shinto) descent, which could be much better 
utilized through craft than assumed or ignored. Other generals, some 
of them Taira, more loyal or more politic, defeated and killed Masakado. 
Strangely enough, his spirit is still worshipped as the Shinto deity, 
"Kanda Miyojin," in the heart of modern Tokio. 

In the last years of the tenth century a general of the newly- 
prominent Minamoto family, Mitsunaba, had supplanted some of the 
Taira in the North. In 1051 the beautiful shrine of Biodoin was 
built by Minamoto Yorimichi, who now took rank, though so near 
Kioti, as a powerful noble. It was at this time, between 1053 and 
1066, that the rising influence of the two families, Taira and Mina- 
moto, brought them into something like rivalry. At the same time, 



FEUDAL ART IN JAPAN 173 

in spite of Fujiwara precautions, the power of each family tended 
to centre in a single clan head. The loyalty of the junior members 
of each house and of their soldiers, half agricultural, half campaign- 
ing, became hereditary, because a necessity in the petty trickeries 
and conflicts that were arising. It is not strange that the half-wild 
soldiers, cut oflF permanently from the traditions of city life and only 
dreading the strange far-away name of Fujiwara, sharing the perils 
of campaign with their trusted leader and in times of peace receiving 
largesse from him out of accumulated stores, should come to have 
their loyalty take on the intensity of a passion. It is just here, 
and especially in the camps of the Minamoto, who had come to 
hold the whole North-East, that first arose that code of exaggerated 
feudal loyalty and honour that five centuries later played such a 
brilliant part in Tokugawa legend and character. Through centuries 
it hardened into an institution and love, like the almost insane love 
that Napoleon's soldiers felt for their semi-detached campaigner in 
Italy and Austria. 

Such was the unstable state of the armies and their generals when 
the bitter feuds among the Fujiwaras called them in as decisive 
factors in 1153. There had already been causes of growing enmity 
and rivalry between the two clans of leaders. Minamoto Yoriyoshi, 
who had spent all his life in baiting Tairas, had died in 1082, and his 
still greater son, Yoshiiye, had been sent by a Fujiwara minister 
in 1091 to put down two rebellious Tairas. 

The Tairas then tried to turn the Minamotos against each other. 
Yoshimitsu had become the single head of the clan before 1127. 
But just here the head of the Taira house, Tadamori, rose into 
great prominence by his brilliant and successful campaign against the 
pirates of the South-West in 1135. Kiyomori had become his 
successor as head of the Southern armies in 1153. Yoshitomo had 
become the hereditary leader of the Northern Minamoto in 1127. 
As a crisis drew near in Fujiwara dissensions both of these ambitious 
generals, smarting with several generations of heated rivalry, began to 
assemble the pick of their troops to the neighbourhood of Kioto. 
When the crash came it was they and their captains who let the 
violence of their civil campaigning derive far more from professional 
hatred than from any real loyalty to the Fujiwara factions who paid 
them, or to the puppet Emperors which it became their respective 



174 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

policies to acknowledge. Thus it was that when the holocaust of 
Kioto in the Hogen Heiji war ended with the triumph of the 
Taira's employees, it was not the Fujiwara remnants who found 
themselves reinstated in the old family power, but a new military 
tyrant, Kiyomori, who for the time used his noble patrons as his 
puppets, just as they were using the Emperor. Minamoto Yoshitomo 
was defeated and killed, and his retainers dispersed in flight to their 
seats in the far North. Kiyomori began to rebuild Kioto, and as 
military dictator devise new laws for its governing. The puppet 
Emperor of the Fujiwaras died in 1165, aged only twenty-three, 
and his successor immediately made Taira Kiyomori prime minister, 
thus elevating him over the heads of the Fujiwara. In 1171 Kiyomori 
married his daughter to the Mikado as legitimate Empress. Thus a 
general of the army, lawless and uncultured, had learned to play the 
same political game taught him by the cultured Fujiwara, in whose 
hands, indeed, it had been less disastrous to the nation. In 1179 
Kiyomori had banished the old ex-Emperor, Go-Shirakawa, who had ruled 
before the Hogen Heiji debacle. The Fujiwara were thus reduced to 
a handful of clerks, and Kiyomori and his family enjoyed the sweets 
and splendours of power in peace at Kioto for twenty years, from 
1 1 60 to ii 80. In this time they borrowed much of external cul- 
ture from their enemies, built fine palaces and wore rich clothing. 
This intermediate age can be called the age of Taira domination. 

It is now important to question what had become of the fine 
arts of Japan during the last stages of Fujiwara weakness, and during 
the Taira ascendency. The connecting link is the secular painting of 
that last Kasuga artist of the Fujiwara, Takachika, of whom we spoke 
at the end of the preceding chapter. He gives us pictures of this 
over-ripe society indeed but in a formal weakness as decadent as 
the reality. What particularly contrasts with the powerful times to 
follow in fact, the work of his own sons is the minuteness 
and absence of all dramatic instinct in his hair line. It is beautiful, 
but forceless. It breathes an atmosphere, but one that is of incense 
and calm waiting. With what a shock the " Praetorian Guards " of 
Minamoto and Taira must have burst into these sleepy precincts. 
Their tough swords would have cut such flesh like cheese. 

The real founder of a new style, that strikes just an antipodal 
note, was the priest Kakuyu, better known by the title Toba Sojo. 




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He could look at all this Imperial ruin falling about him and laugh. 
He it was who determined to relieve the dire distress of the 
Emperor Toba-in* by making panoramas of humorous sketches, 
largely of animals horses, bulls, dogs, frogs and goats acting 
as if they were human beings. Doubtless some sting of Buddhist 
satire lay behind the seeming joke. The work was dashed off in 
almost pure line, but with a racy vigour and sweep of motion that 
make it live. A number of rolls of these historic drawings are 
preserved in the little temple of Kozanji among the hills to the 
north-west of Kioto. These are reckoned among the great treasures 
of the i Empire. We reproduce here the famous " Battle of the 
Bulls," which illustrates well Toba Sojo's extraordinary power, and 
seems, in spite of its simplicity of line, to realize the utmost 
impression of shock. 

What this new work actually accomplished was something like 
half a dozen revolutions. It is the real beginning of secular art in 
Japan, as opposed to the religious forms, sculpture and painting, 
with which alone we have been engrossed so far in this work. It 
is the first important display of humour since the decadent statues 
of Nara. It employs bare black and white instead of Takachika's 
illuminated colour. It gives us an absolutely new line, flexible like 
the Buddhist, thickening like Godoshi's, yet as far removed from 
lead lines as flesh is from metal. It infuses juice into Takachika's 
delineation without becoming abstract penmanship. 

What it does is to give us flexibility of muscles in action ; and 
here is one of the greatest of the revolutions motion. The mystical 
Buddhist art gave us splendid poses, the suggestion of freedom to act, 
especially in Godoshi, Ririomin and Kanawoka. Still, upon the whole 
it was a statuesque art, dramatically grouped, yet with severe dignity. 
But Toba Sojo has thrown dignity to the winds, yet gives us a full 
impression of life. In all these points he foreshadows qualities that 
are to become dominant in a new school for the next two centuries. 

Another important work of Toba Sojo is the " Shigi-zan Engi," 
kept in the temple on the top of Shigi mountain in Yamato, to the 
north-west of Tatsuta. This, too, is humorous, narrating the miracle 
by which a whole storehouse full of rice is said to have been carried 

*The name of this Emperor while reigning was Sutoku, after retirement he was known 
as Toba-in. 



176 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

up through the air to the needy abbots during the time of a siege. 
Here we get the wonderful crisp short stroke of the coming Tosa, 
done with a soft yet free pen, in human figures and their draperies. 
The efforts of an aged, fat Fujiwara lord to mount his horse are 
humorous indeed. 

The other chief innovator, who worked at first in Kiyomori's 
time, was a scion of the hitherto reigning aristocratic house, Fujiwara 
Takanobu, who, like so many of his relatives, is found in this and 
the succeeding age ready to turn fine education and ripe talents to 
good use in earning a living. These threadbare nobles, whose 
ancestors had been the literary lights of ages, writing for power, 
fame or imperial patronage, now had to set to in earnest, and pen 
it away for daily rice. It is only fair to say that they did it with 
such fine dignity as to win new encomiums from their rivals. The 
tales of these poor " kuge," emperors and nobles alike shabbily 
neglected by a new brutal race of lords, afford one of the chief 
romantic motives of the middle ages, in story and in plays. 

Takanobu's work is rare ; but one of his important pieces is 
the elaborate set of large paintings in the Boston Art Museum, 
narrating the whole romantic life of Shotoku Taishi in separate 
dramatic scenes. This set was the most important heirloom of the 
Sumiyoshi family at the death of its last patriarch, my teacher 
Hirokata, in 1885. To save it from the possible wrangling of heirs, 
and to leave ready money to his estimable widow, he, on his death- 
bed, sold it to me. His signature, painfully affixed to the receipt, 
is treasured by me as his last autograph. It is only next in impor- 
tance to the Keion roll, in the Tosa paintings of the Fenollosa 
Collection. It was regarded by generations of Tosas and Sumiyoshis 
as the typical example of Takanobu in Japan. 

In its drawing of hundreds of men, horses and other animals it 
is not so racy and free as Toba Sojo's, retaining something of the 
stiffness displayed by Kose Hirotaka in the secular portions of his 
"Scenes of Hell" at Sakamoto. But the strokes are softer and freer 
than the latter, less like a design in wonderfully graded wires, flowing 
together more like small and continuous streams. The action and 
grouping are both striking, and a new special effect is produced in the 
individuality of the faces. Here no trace remains of Chinese Buddhist 
countenances, as found in Kose; rather it is the every-day type of 




PORTRAIT OF YORITOMO. By Takanobu. 



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FEUDAL ART IN JAPAN 177 

Japanese countenance, veritable portraits, as seen about him in the 
Kioto streets. The effect of realism is further enhanced by the 
revolutionary convention of discarding all attempts at archaeological 
accuracy in costume. To reproduce the dress and armour of his 
vivid exciting days was enough for Takanobu, even though his 
subject reverted to six hundred year old scenes. In this innovation 
he is followed by the whole line of Tosa artists. He has retained 
colour in this work, and, unfortunately, the use of silk, the frailty of 
which has led to some defacement. The landscape backgrounds are a 
naturalistic modification of the Kose, as found in their Japanese altar- 
pieces : green and blue mountains in free running strata as may be 
photographed to-day in Kioto suburbs and fine curving trees of purely 
Japanese varieties. In this respect of landscape, also, Takanobu is the 
forerunner of Tosa. 

But perhaps Takanobu's greatest contemporary fame was found in 
his portraiture. With a few telling lines he could bring before us 
the very individuality of the passing notables. A group of such 
portraits on silk, large seated figures, is still kept at the temple 
Jingoji in Takawo, one of Kobo Daishi's erections. Of these the most 
important, historically and aesthetically, is the only great authoritative 
portrait of Minamoto Yoritomo, the son of that Yoshitomo defeated 
by Kiyomori in 1 1 60, and whose unique deeds in the age that 
immediately supervened we have now to narrate. 

The Fujiwara had been overturned and the rude Taira had 
supplanted them. Very well, then, we are perhaps on the verge of 
a new and modified court age at historic Kioto. So, no doubt, 
thought the Taira lords who were giving themselves up to unwonted 
dissipation. But it was a short and vain dream. There was an eaglet 
abroad, two fledglings in fact, escaped from the Minamoto nest which 
Kiyomori had thought to annihilate. When Yoshitomo and the flower 
of their clan fell, his wife, the famous and beautiful Tokiwa Gozen, 
with her two little sons Yoritomo and Yoshitsune, fled from the environs 
of Kioto and tried to make their way to the fertile plains still held 
by her friends in the North East, and where she knew the education 
of those who should avenge their father would be in safe hands. 
Kiyomori had already issued an edict of proscription for the sons, whose 
family valour he knew he would some day have reason to fear. Spies 
were hounding them past Lake Biwa and through the central mountains. 



178 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

Then it was that the devoted mother made that supremely romantic 
sacrifice of Japanese history : of diverting Kiyomori's attention from her 
fleeing boys by offering herself as a mistress to her husband's slayer. 
The ruse succeeded, and Yoritomo, with his younger brother, spent 
the twenty years of Taira domination in their family fastness of the 
far North, nerving to extraordinary deeds their young arms and souls 
and consolidating and replenishing the scattered wealth and power of 
their once conquering clan. There were Tairas who foresaw what was 
coming and tried to prepare for it. But the majority of them were 
given over to the luxuries of the day and minimized the danger of 
attack from so remote and barbarous a region. 

There is no space for me here more than to hint at the amazing 
series of terrible events which convulsed now not only Kioto but 
the whole of Japan, between 1180 and 1192. The Hogen Heiji 
war had been child's play to it. It was now civil war on a national 
scale, waged in unheard-of bitterness, and for enormous stakes that 
were now fairly estimated by both contestants. It was playing not 
only for the wealth and power of the hopelessly lost Fujiwara, but 
for a new Imperial organization ; a contrast between the ancient West 
and the newly arisen East : between Chinese city institutions and the 
purely Japanese feudal life of the camps ; between prescribed ceremony and 
priestly formula and the rude individuality of the sword-wielders ; between 
town and village ; between the reign of law and the reign of life. Yoritomo 
founded his new capital of the North East at Kamakura, on Suruga 
Bay, not far from the base of Fujiyama, from which he could direct 
naval operations, as well as the Hakone military road it commanded. 
His brilliant brother Yoshitsune, and his uncle executed a rapid 
series of campaigns which eventually gave them Kioto. The Tairas 
retired in hasty caparison to their great sea-stronghold near the 
present Kobe where a great naval action was fought between thousands 
of warships. The Tairas fled farther South toward Shimonoseki, taking 
with them their boy Emperor, the grandson of Kiyomori. In 1 1 84 the 
Minamoto put up their faction Emperor, Gotoba, at Kioto ; and 
following the enemy defeated them in a second Japanese Actium in 
the Straits of Shimonoseki. It is all a stupendous tragedy of most 
picturesque setting and chivalrous incident, an epic indeed of richer scope 
and significance than Agamemnon at Ilium, and which has also yielded 
rich story for native prose, verse and drama. Then came Yoritomo's 



FEUDAL ART IN JAPAN 179 

unfortunate jealousy of his young brother Yoshitsune idol of the 
Minamoto-ed nation his murder in 1189; Yoritomo's crafty scheme 
of reorganization on the basis of a Minamoto adherent as local lord in 
every prominent capital, surrounded with a camp of Minamoto soldiers, 
1175; the supplanting of Kioto as administrative capital by Kamakura ; 
the investiture of Yoritomo by the Emperor with the title " Seitai 
Shogun," 1192 a thing that meant perhaps little to the Emperor, but 
everything to Yoritomo and his successors for seven hundred years. 
For though military and provincial in form, it now meant, if not source 
of authority, totality of executive power in fact. The poor old Emperor 
signed away with that name, if not his birth-right, at least the whole 
revenue and prestige of his court. The palace became a barren prison, 
where Imperial relatives and decayed Fujiwaras still received pretentious 
Chinese credentials of ministry, but quite devoid of function. It is to 
these shorn courts, rather than to Yoritomo's new one, that the artists 
of the Tosa school became attached as underfed court painters. Kama- 
kura was never a seat of high culture, producing but few noted authors 
or artists, though it often availed itself of Kioto talent. The real 
power in the state, nevertheless, was feudal ; and it is this innovation 
of a full-fledged feudal system, the work of Yoritomo, that from now 
on conditions life in Japan, even the life and motives and names of 
the Tosa artists at the Mikado's court. 

It is worth while here to stop and describe at length some of the 
characteristics of this first form of the feudal system, because they so 
strongly reflect themselves in contemporary art. In the first place it 
must be remembered that Japan had been practically cut ofF from 
China since the fall of Northern Sung to the Tartar Kins in 
1127. Its relations with Sung had never been as close as 
with Tang. But with Tartars in the North, and the Southern 
Sung hardly able to hold their own against both Kin and 
Mongols, the Chinese were as little likely to renew the intercourse 
as were the Japanese. The feudal system was to be a purely insular 
institution, owing nothing to continental inspiration. And after 1280, 
when the Southern Sung also fell before the Mongols and China became 
ruled by a Tartar Emperor, indifference was succeeded by open hostility. 
Thus Japan was left to reorganize herself as best she might with native 
material. Yoritomo had begun the parcelling out of the North as military 
fiefs to his captains as early as 1175; this he now extended to the whole 



i8o EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

country. Castled towns arose in a hundred central districts. All men 
with hopes and ambitions wished to range themselves under some local 
leader. The peasants tilled the land on rental ; all trace of the Taihorio 
laws had vanished. Society tended to disperse to the provinces, or to 
Kamakura, leaving Kioto half deserted. 

Here came in a reaction in architecture. Citadels arose with bases of 
faced stones and towered superstructures of heavy beams and plaster. 
Within the large enclosures stood residences for the daimyo families 
and storehouses for munitions of war. This feudal architecture of the 
castles is partly based upon the style of circumvallation of Chinese cities, 
and is not unlike the famous Thibetan Potala of Lhassa. 

For private law society fell back upon the unwritten rules of the 
primitive village organisation, with its head-man, and its germ of a town 
council, and the rough recognition of ordinary human justice. It was this 
preservation of waning forms that the modern codifiers of 1890 seized 
upon in order to make an important factor of purely native institutions. 

A profound reaction took place upon Japanese character also. The 
formal, courtly manner, the deference to rank and precedent, the welcomed 
yokes of intellectual and of priestly sanction, were suddenly replaced by 
the bare physical and mental efficiency of a man. He who could think 
quickly, and plan resourcefully, and act firmly any such might rise from 
the ranks to castle power. For these unstable social units were pitted 
against each other in constant local strife, which a somewhat loose allegiance 
to Kamakura could not wholly check. It was a day when all pretences 
and conventions blew thin, and man's worth for man individuality, that 
is came out into relief. Then, indeed, was laid that foundation of 
Japanese quickness and adaptability which has amazed the world in their 
recent struggle with Russia. It is just because China has been slowly 
throttled in the silken meshes of her own culture, which Japan has for 
seven hundred years been cutting her way through to freedom, that the 
two races to-day invite such strange contrast. 

It is this flashing of vivid personality lighting up the 
Kamakura annals that makes this disintegrating epoch so absorbing 
in interest. European writers in general have spoken of it as a sad 
age of anarchy, superstition, cruelty and ignorance. And indeed, it 
has many points of analogy with the German feudal system into which 
Europe broke up with the decay of the Carolingian Empire. Yet 
it was out of the manhood vigour of both, rather than from a bare 




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Imperial renaissance, that the hope of the future was to spring. For 
literature itself now becomes romantic. Fairy tales, and ogres, and 
gallant or desperate adventures, sometimes even to free oppressed 
ladies, enter into their crude novels. There is almost no scholarship 
except at the Kioto court, and nobody cares for any. It is a 
striking confirmation of the dominance of this new state of individuality 
that just here, in the early part of the thirteenth century, begins to 
arise a native and secular drama and that, too, a comedy (Kiogen) 
out of the buffoonery of farmers at village festivals. This was taken 
up by the new nobility, and even by the priests of the Shinto 
temples, and erected into organizations of professionals who acted on 
permanent stages. For in all forms of literature, as in life, it was 
now life itself man himself who became of interest to all classes of 
man. The subjects of romances were no longer the languorous 
ecstacies of silken lords and ladies, as in the Fujiwara " Monogatari," 
but often the triviality and even the ribaldry of common life. This 
is the real root of what has persisted till to-day of essential 
democracy in the Japanese. Even the recent Tokugawa formalism of 
two hundred years has passed over like a shadow, leaving the coolie 
as good a citizen, and a citizen as interesting to all classes, as he 
was in Kamakura days. 

It was natural that religion also should feel the same levelling 
personal impulse. Just as the palace labyrinths and perfumed 
embroidery had been relegated to ash-heaps and junk-shops, so the 
mystic ritualism and the papal insolence of the Tendai regime had 
to yield to the new demand of a simple faith for simple folk. The 
Shingon discipline of self-purification was too high, too long, and too 
inconsequent for men whose time was chiefly occupied in carving up 
their enemies. Like the fierce Spanish conquistadors, the Japanese 
knights of helmet and mail wished to kneel with tears to a faith 
that did not require them to think deeply. So it was now that 
three or four great priests arose contemporary with St. Francis of 
Assisi in Italy, and with the Gothic churches, who went about 
preaching simple faith to the masses Saigio, and Shinran, and Nichirin. 
(Saigio died 1198 Shinran, 1262 Nichirin, 1282.) Then it was that 
the only purely Japanese sects of Buddhism arose by a protestant 
simplifying of Tendai, Shingon and Jodo philosophy and ritual. All 
you have to do is to believe in Amida said these newer creeds, 



1 82 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

and he will save you. Belief itself mere personal surrender is 
the primary thing. Great masses, and complicated genuflections, 
and altars hidden from the people all these have not half as 
much efficacy as good hortatory sermons. On this account temple 
architecture became changed. In old days services had gone on in 
the small encrusted sanctuary whether a congregation participated or 
not. The Pantheon of gods needed constant pampering ; the people 
did not so much matter. But now that all gods but Amida were 
thrown out Amida who would take his faithful to live for ever in 
his own golden Paradise and that service was directed to the people 
rather than to Heaven, the size of the building had to be vastly en- 
larged and the furnishing simplified in order to accommodate the 
congregation. Hence the great open, matted, many-pillared front spaces 
of the Honganji temples as we study them to-day. Monastic orders, 
too, of itinerant monks arose simultaneously in Japan and Europe 
mendicant orders, who passed in chanting files from castle to castle, 
collecting rice in their black wooden alms-bowls and carrying the news 
of the day and their oral traditions of learning from house to house. 

In such a new world as this it was inevitable that the profoundest 
sort of reaction would seize upon visual art also. Individuality would 
necessarily be its key-note ; thus democracy in subject, dramatic group- 
ing and the motions of violent action. Already the germs of all these 
things had been given form in the early paintings of Fujiwara Takanobu 
and of Toba Sojo, who had introduced the " makimono," or library 
panorama. Here was room for continuous crowded scenes of street 
pageantry, of fairs and temple courts, horse-races and cock-fights, the 
servants sweating and joking in the kitchen, councils of grey-robed 
monks, humorously travestied, and every possible stage of camp-life and 
active war. Art was a kind of journal, unprinted, that circulated about 
in the Imperial Court and sometimes found its way into the scattered 
courts of the daimyos. For the Emperor and his portfolioless ministers 
seem to have found a sort of desperate pleasure in watching the Saturn- 
alia of a life about them in which they could play no part. Rolls were 
multiplied of illustrated biographies, often becoming the treasures of 
temples whose priestly founders they celebrated. The incipient prose 
epics that were slowly maturing from the mists of myth that hovered 
around great deeds needed colour illumination. In short, the Tosa 
makimono becomes a sort of Bayeux tapestry, with a meagre interlude 




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of verbal explanation. Yes, what Sesostris sculptured on the rock tents 
of Egypt, and Nebuchadnezzar spread in glowing tiles upon the walls of 
Khosabad, such immortalizing of local heroism did Keion and Mitsunaga 
perpetrate upon frail sheets of parchment paper. 

The drawing of the art is minute and vivid. The swing of action 
is a primary requisite, then the sweeping of the lines of many actions 
into great general line-currents that give motion to the crowded 
compositions, so unlike European Renaissance battle pieces Jules 
Romano's for instance, whose horses and men squirm in all directions, 
with no unified transference of masses. This the West finds only in 
Greek art (the Battle of Darius), and recent French cavalry charges 
(Aime Morot). But in Japan it forms the backbone of the picture. 
Colour, too, realistic but not too gorgeous, adds vividness, and its 
spotting of light and dark passages lends savour and accent even to 
the motion. It is an art not at all unlike primitive Greek painting, 
especially as shown in the figures of horses and men in simple colour 
and spotting upon Greek vases. We may assume that such mosaics 
as the " Darius " had finer antecedents in mural pageants. The colour 
is probably richer and more varied in the Japanese. In form, too, we 
might perhaps say that the rushing personages look as if bombs had 
been exploded under the feet of figures on the Greek vases. Another 
analogue is the contemporary early Italian Gothic frescoing of the 
Giottoesque school. In those squares, crowded with mounted officers 
and spectators of crucifixions, which fill the plastered arches of Assisi 
and Padua, we see something like Tosa richness of grouping, even if 
without Tosa vividness of motion. If we could have an art that 
would combine modern French scientific drawing of motion with the 
picturesque crowds of Cavalcatori, we should strike somewhere near 
the battlepieces of Keion and the street scenes of Mitsunaga. 

Perhaps the very richest period was that which followed Yoritomo's 
triumph, Kenkiu, which lasted about ten years after 1 1 90. Then 
probably Takanobu still lived, and his great son Fujiwara Nobuzane 
was rising into notice. Then, too, the sons of Kasuga Takachika, 
Mitsunaga and Keion were coming to ripe age. These three may be 
said to form the second and greatest generation of the Tosa artists. 
I use the word Tosa here only in an inaccurate generic sense, because 
the name was not actually given to the school until somewhat later, 
with the son of Mitsunaga, Tsunetaka. The Kasuga family then 



1 84 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

became the Tosa family without discontinuity. I ought to say that 
in these relationships I follow mainly the recension of genealogies 
which has passed current in the Sumiyoshi branch of the modern 
Tosa. Some of the younger Japanese scholars are disposed to throw 
all such traditions to the winds : to declare that we do not know 
whether Nobuzane ever lived or was a painter, or whether Mitsunaga 
had anything to do with Takachika, or was the brother of Keion. 
But all such disputations must be at this stage of the game rather 
of an academic interest to a few Japanese scholars than of service 
to the world. For, after all, whether their names were Nobuzane or 
Mitsunaga, or Henrique or Brooks, their works remain to study, and 
delight in, and classify, and use as the mirror of a rapidly gliding 
history. Until the extreme school can give us something more positive 
than denials, it will be the safest guardedly to follow the Tokugawa 
scholarship of the Sumiyoshis who prepared these lists for the use of 
the Shogun's court. Especially is it well to follow their canons of 
criticism and ascriptions of remaining examples, since it is these which 
have practically determined the labelling of all the modern re-collections 
of Japan. Most pieces have changed hands, from house to house and 
from temple to house, since 1868 ; and since Sumiyoshi Hirokata's death 
these have been mostly identified, according to his traditions, by his 
fellow-pupil with myself, Yamana Kwangi. It is Yamana's certificates 
that are found to-day with Buddhist and Tosa pieces in all Japanese 
collections, and attached to much that has recently come in to Europe and 
America. It is proper to say that my own expert attribution of pieces, 
whether of those in the Boston collections, or in the hands of Mr. Freer 
and others, has been made along identical lines with Yamana's, and 
that most of the pieces in the Fenollosa collection at Boston passed 
under Hirokata's own criticism before 1885. There may exist other 
schools of Tosa criticism, but none, I think, with such claim to authority. 
Of the three greatest men I shall take Nobuzane first, though perhaps 
the youngest, because his style is most individual. In his makimonos, 
kept at Kozanji, and representing the transmission of the Kegon doctrine 
from China through Korea to Japan, he comes nearest to the style of Toba 
Sojo. The design is solely in black-and-white, and relies chiefly on a 
light, nervous, flowing line. A great storm-dragon pursues the ship of the 
commissioner. The waves are beaten flat, and lightning shoots in key-like 
forms. The type of the dragon remains essentially Tang, in spite of the 





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FEUDAL ART IN JAPAN 185 

Japanese brushwork. One of the finest passages is a scene in China where 
boatmen land on a shore, and porters, themselves laden, drive on over- 
laden bulls and horses. There is nothing so pathetically real in rustic art, 
except Millet's peasants. Here, however, is also a touch of humour, 
which Millet always lacks. 

Another of Nobuzane's greatest sources of fame was his portraits. 
A Fujiwara by birth, he knew all the members of the fallen generation, 
and has left us most interesting sketches of their individual faces. He 
also has left the best ideal portraits of the thirty-six chief poets of the 
vanished age. That he made light of his own misfortunes is seen in his 
humorous painting of a social gathering in an old battered hut, where 
he, as host, with companions dressed in homespun, drink and dance away 
their sorrows. A servant bearing a jug of wine breaks through the 
rotting floor. 

But the greatest work of Nobuzane in makimono form, if not the 
greatest of the whole Tosa school, is his long panoramic account, in nine 
wide scrolls, of the life of Michizane, the learned anti-Fujiwara minister 
of Engi. These are worked out in a kind of demonaic line, so 
powerful and individual that the drawing at times seems childishly 
distorted, as in Whistler's roughest work. Yet the effect is most intense ; 
I have sat before these stupendous rolls again and again, with the flesh of 
my back creeping as during a Wagner opera and tears standing in my eyes. 
The physical and spiritual excitement of it is greater than of any work I 
know. Yet much of this supreme effect is lost in the photographs, since 
it is also the unique colouring that helps to produce the charm. It may 
be said that the tones, though ranging through all shades of dull pinks, 
mauves and olives, are in the main a terrific contrast of luminous oranges 
against blues so dark that they seem actually blacker than black. This 
depth is got by scumbling powdered ultramarine over glossy inks. Of all 
impressionistic work in the line of story-telling this is the world's greatest. 

And it tells a story, indeed, which realizes Fujiwara tragedy with an 
intensity wholly Kamakuran. Michizane was born and brought up to 
archery and letters and music, like any proud child ; we are shown it 
all in the first roll. Then comes a long procession of nobles in litters 
or on horseback passing to a temple to celebrate his coming of manhood. 
Nobuzane takes this occasion to make his horses leap and prance as 
no European but Rubens has ever conceived. The finest prancing 
horse is spotted in chocolate and cream, with scarlet trappings. In the 

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1 86 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

monastery yard we are treated to a genre scene which recalls the money- 
changers and hucksters in Solomon's temple. It is true that at the 
far end, on the broad verandah, sit a fine group of lacquer-hatted 
gentlemen and veiled ladies in every tone of soft garment, from creamed 
grape-juice to amethyst, who decorously listen to the old priest droning 
away at his beads under the latticed awning. Every figure is indivi- 
dualized in pose and turn of head. But down below, in the yard, we 
have a motley group of servants, small boys, acolytes and nuns, who 
are eyeing the crowd or joking with each other. The small boy 
leaning on a pile of hats is a strong bit of drawing. Bales of cotton 
under a gorgeous tarpaulin typify offerings. The singular hooded 
priests from Hiyei-zan stand back in a group. Behind all is a richly 
comic passage where the younger priests, kneeling in white robes, 
expostulate with shocked gestures to three drunken samurai in loose 
undress of delicious pattern who are desecrating the sanctuary with 
their ribaldry. One tucks up his spotted skirt as if to fight the 
acolytes, but a companion grasps him about the waist. Clearly 
Nobuzane has here given us not at all a picture of the sedate days of 
Sugawara, but a contemporary sketch pulsing with precious details of 
a devil-may-care life. 

In a second roll follow the long scenes of conflict between Michizane 
and his enemies, the blindness of the Emperor, who is warned by a 
magnificent thunder-storm with sulphurous fumes and gold lightning 
that shivers the palace and bowls over the crimson lacqueys like so 
many leaded dolls. The Hiyei-zan pope, too, crosses the Southern 
Kamo by a Red Sea miracle of rolling back its waters, while his bull- 
chariot dashes through the bed with wheels whose spokes are a blur. 
Naught avails, however, and Michizane is banished to a desolate Southern 
island. Groups of curious peasants follow his chariot through the 
mountains. Motley crowds rush to the shore to see him washed to land 
from a shipwreck. It is all pure provocative for Nobuzane's exuberance 
of genre ; yet the dramatic sting is never lacking. There in his island 
he occupies for some years a rotten hut. Friends visit him surreptitiously, 
but he refuses to return against his Emperor's order. Rank unhealthy 
vines keep damp the leaking roof, the garden is an impressionistic tangle 
of wild shrubs in orange and green. At length the premonitory old 
man climbs a peak and protests his innocence to the god of storms, 
who snatches a last written message to the Emperor in order to convey 



FEUDAL ART IN JAPAN 187 

it miraculously to the Kioto palace even while he smites the petitioner 
with death. 

Michizane's body is being slowly carried back to Kioto in a cart 
when the belaboured bull which draws it sinks and dies. On the very 
spot the attendants dig his grave with the butt-ends of their spears. 
A dog scratches his chin with his hind leg. Michizane is soon declared 
to be the god Tenjin, and the Shinto shrine of Kitano is erected to his 
memory on the Northern outskirts of Kioto ; for which shrine these 
very precious rolls were painted, and where they are still kept. The 
marble bull which fell is here and in other Tenjin shrines, as Kameido 
in Tokio, visible as a sacred symbol. 

You might think this to be a fair end for the legend ; not so 
Nobuzane. His blood is just up, his opportunity is just coming, he 
has half his work yet to create. For should not the wicked enemy 
of Michizane who procured his banishment be punished both on 
earth and in Hell ? On earth he is affected with a distress that 
causes snakes to creep from his ears. But Hell ! ah, what could be 
a more deliciously opportune morsel for a painter's imagination ? 
He gets at it by degrees. We see Fujiwara Tokihira's spirit carried 
oward Hell by devils. We see great scarlet flames escaping through 
the gates. Then come four long splendid horrible rolls of torture. If 
Nobuzane were Okio, as in the latter's Miidera tortures, we could not 
bear him. But the horror is magnificently offset both by the humour 
and by the colour something as an infusion of soda keeps tomato 
acid from curdling milk. It is useless to describe it. Orcagna at 
Santa Maria Novella is a fool to it. Nobuzane could give him a 
hundred years handicap and win. Flames of crimson, scarlet and 
orange shoot all over the place in interlaced and forked serpent- 
tongues. Jolly, barbarous devils with cat faces pursue their nefarious 
calling of dragging wicked ladies by the hair ; roasting a bishop or two 
half strangled in a Chinese cangue ; sawing slabs of flesh with rusty 
blades from men who have been marked with a taut, inked carpenter's 
string ; pouring red hot lead down their wretched throats ; nailing 
their distended tongues to the floor and forcing poisonous insects to 
crawl upon them ; or stirring gallons of human broth in copper 
cauldrons. One delightful green fiend, front face on, possessing a 
single cream coloured horn, holds a human victim head down in his 
two hands, and gradually tears the body apart. This might do for 

p 2 



1 88 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

a starter, but Nobuzane has far deeper game in view, no less a 
scheme than to picture all the various worlds of suffering and passion, 
cognate with Hell, through which souls, even those of deva, must 
learn to pass. But he never finished the stupendous work. His 
brush fell in death as he sketched an outline passage whose inhibited 
colour no human soul can ever conceive. 

The second of our Yoritomo geniuses is Kasuga Mitsunaga, the 
reputed son (but possibly grandson) of that same Takachika who drew 
faineant courtiers with line so fine that it simply vanished without 
your knowing where. But Mitsunaga, like a true founder of the new 
art, thickened his passionate line nearly to the quality of Toba Sojo's, 
and then filled its gaps with colour on a scale as different from 
Nobuzane's as Venus from Mars. His line riots in massed street 
fights, and runaway chariots, and conflagations that hurl brands over 
crazy crowds. The paper seems about to tear itself to pieces with 
the opposed lines of surging. His colour scheme is passages of 
lemon yellow shading into orange, spotted with patterns of light blue 
and deep pink and thrown against darks of mixed olives and crimsons. 
This is the real Tosa scale of early Kamakura, and it is unlike any other 
colour passages of the world's art with which I am acquainted ; Fortuny 
and Monticelli at their gayest giving just a hint of it. 

Mitsunaga's greatest work was the " Nenchiu Giogi," a sort of 
pictorial diary in sixty rolls that narrated all the striking scenes of 
Kioto life from January to December. Some twenty rolls of this 
remained in the Imperial Treasury, and were brought to Tokio in 
1868 ; but were burned in a palace fire a few years later. The 
Sumiyoshi had carefully coloured copies of some of these. 1 
succeeded in obtaining for my collection, now in Boston, a set of 
outline copies made from them more than two hundred years ago 
by Sumiyoshi Jokei, the founder of the branch line that located 
with the Shogun at Yedo. The runaway chariot is found from 
these, also the guards waving torches at night while the fat gentle- 
men sup under a shed, also the great cock-fight where men throw 
up their hats and knock small boys down in their excitement. Of 
the minor works of Mitsunaga, we have a fragment of Hell, and 
two rolls of the visit of Abe no Nakamaro to China. This latter 
makes a humorous contrast of Japanese and Chinese customs. There 
are some genre scenes, of which one of the best is a contemporary 











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FEUDAL ART IN JAPAN 189 

surgical operation, where a squatting gentleman doctor calmly punctures, 
while a priest sits by and watches with eager horror. 

But perhaps the finest coloured rolls of which the original remains 
are the scenes of " The Burning of the Gate." The people in the 
street stop, drop their loads and begin to run as they hear the fire- 
bells. Mounted policemen waving metal sticks dash up from behind. 
The flames drive back the yellow, green and milk-blue crowds who 
save the singeing of their brows with uplifted sleeves. Then comes a 
humorous procession of mounted knights in armour and holding 
folded banners, which out-does Dore's Don Quixote. Their ill-fed, 
knock-kneed horses are veritable Rosinantes, and the affected gallantry 
with which the horsemen rival each other in holding their banners is 
wit straight from Cervantes. 

We come now to Mitsunaga's younger brother, who took the 
priestly name Sumiyoshi Keion. In some respects he was the greatest 
of the three, the greatest draughtsman certainly. He had little of 
the humour of Toba Sojo and the others, and his colour is more 
commonplace, relying more on good straightforward reds and blues 
and greens. But his notan, that is his dark and light "spotting," is 
even more effective than theirs. He is no such impressionist as 
Nobuzane ; he is more sane and business-like. But in his stupendous 
massing of crowded line into totality of motion there is no one 
who approaches him. His subjects, too, lend themselves to such 
treatment. For, above all others, he is the greatest painter of battle- 
pieces the central deeds of violence in all Japan's military history, the 
mighty struggle out of whose tearing asunder his own and his 
contemporaries' individuality arose on light wing. Probably he saw in 
his youth the Hogen Heiji horror; knew Yoshitsune by sight, and 
witnessed Kiyomori's triumph ; watched Yoritomo grow to manhood, 
and may have been in Yoshitsune's train when the fortress at Dan 
No Ura went up in flames. At any rate the grim, determined spirit 
of the day is his not so much its roystering fun, but its keenness, 
cruelty and impersonality. Photographs of the Russo-Japanese war 
give no such vivid idea as he does of the Japanese military soul. If 
we compare his charges and ambuscades and cautious marches of 
crowded men and horses with the battle pieces of European masters, 
it is only the ancient Greek and the most recent French who can 
approach him in reality of motion. 

P 3 



190 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

Keion has left us an interesting makimono of a religious subject 
treated with secular frankness. It is all part of a human story, in 
which Amida himself and his music-loving Bhodisattwa sweep through a 
regular Tosa landscape to their act of blessing. They are no 
longer the hieratic figures of altar-pieces, not shining in unhuman 
gold but drifting over the water like graceful floating clouds. Single 
figure pieces, as of a mounted warrior in full armour turning in his 
saddle and looking backward seen in fact from behind so that the 
head of his rearing horse is hidden behind his body are found in 
either originals or copies. One of the most splendid small groups is 
copied upon a fan by no less an artist of later date than Honnami 
Koyetsu. We shall speak of this again in Chapter XIV. There is 
no record as to whether it really is a copy, or an original compo- 
sition in the style of Keion. If the latter it is a most astounding 
revival, for no such drawing of soldiers exists in the four hundred 
years between Keion and Koyetsu. Koyetsu studied the great Tosa 
masters, especially Nobuzane and Keion, with great care, and I am 
inclined to believe this at least a free transcript from some lost Keion. 
It represents the capture of an armoured courier by five foot soldiers 
of his enemy a sort of Major Andre scene, in which the dismounted 
suspect seems to be trying to swallow his dispatches. The splendidly 
drawn horse is being held down by three of the soldiers, who, with 
their strong contrasts of white and black, make an unusually close 
and unconventional composition. The lines and mass of the horse 
and the three men are all tangled together. The brutal excitement 
of the faces is powerfully rendered. 

The greatest remaining secular work of Keion is his panorama in 
three long rolls of scenes in the Hogan Heiji war. These three have 
been held in separate possession since early Tokugawa days. The 
two that are still in Japan in private hands are very interesting. In 
one there are vast stretches of mountain and forest, through which 
wander figures in small groups. In one place they fall upon the 
corpse of a warrior, who is lying, feet toward the bottom of the pic- 
ture, with his throat cut. This is well-nigh the only striking piece 
of fore-shortened drawing in all Chinese and Japanese art. This 
would have delighted the late Dr. Anderson, of London, who seems 
to have thought that Tosa drawing is too childish to merit the name 
of art. In the second roll we see a squadron of cavalry advancing 







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FEUDAL ART IN JAPAN 191 

slowly between two lines of bull-chariots. The action of the leader 
on the black horse, with proud, arching neck, is very fine. 

But it is the third roll which reaches the full height of Keion's 
powers in military delineation. This was formerly in the possession 
of the Honda family, and I had the privilege of studying it and 
photographing it more than once on the occasions of the loan collec- 
tions of daimyos' treasures held by the Art Club annually since 1882. 
I hardly thought then that some day this supreme work would fall 
into my own possession. The overcoming of the difficulties in its 
acquirement would form a romance in itself. It is undoubtedly the 
greatest treasure of the thousand or more pictorial masterpieces which, 
under the name of the " Fenollosa Collection," I contributed, through 
Dr. Weld, to the Boston Art Museum in 1886. It was carefully 
photographed several times during my administration as curator of the 
museum (1890-1896), and had recently been photographed again, very 
beautifully, for the museum. 

The roll opens (from the right, of course) with the terrified flight 
of a court party, few of whom have had time to don their armour. 
Gentlemen on horseback are racing for dear life, trampling down 
citizens and grooms. In front of them whirls a group of chariots 
drawn by bullocks. The wheels whizz like electric fans. One of the 
chariots, surrounded by archers in lacquered caps, has its course blocked. 
In the confusion one of the bulls has turned upon the struggling mass 
and his rocking chariot crashes over prostrate crowds. In this part of 
the continuous composition the prevailing horizontal lines of the general 
rush are broken chiefly by the angular course of this runaway. Every 
attitude of horse and man, every clearly drawn face, is tense with fear 
and wild energy. Here we see such individual types as are familiar 
to-day on the streets of Tokio. I could almost venture to assign 
some of the family names. The composition is so close that one can 
scarcely catch a glimpse of the ground through the swarming bodies. 
There is no scenic display as in the Morot accessories at Versailles. 
It is rather like the Alexander mosaic at Naples, in which the prevailing 
lines of the moving figures tell the whole pictorial story. Caps and 
heads and chariot roofs appear over the lower edge of the picture, a 
vivid arrangement under a down-looking perspective, incomprehensible 
to ancients and Italians, and seen only in modern French impressionism, 
such as Degas' jockeys. A moment more and the mad mass turns a 



192 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

corner, dashing down almost front on to the spectator, as we see 
reality in modern moving pictures. This powerful transition of angles 
is aided by the long dark shafts of the chariots and the tilt of chariot 
awnings. The variety of line and notan passage is here infinite, crammed 
at every part with startling new feeling and beauty, a torrent of 
torrents, a spotted mosaic whose apparent confusion is subordinate to 
clear keys. 

The device of a garden wall divides this passage of the flight from 
a scene where an ancient palace is burning. The flames of orange, 
yellow and red play up in splendid writhing curves into clouds of 
brown and blue smoke. How unlike are these rounded tongues to 
the forked scarlet sword-blades of Nobuzane's fires ! It is as if we had 
here an instantaneous " snap-shot " at a conflagration. Soldiers in 
armour with gloved hands are butchering the fugitives and peering 
to discover some who may have hidden under the already smoking 
verandahs. There in the court-yard a shouting, twisting guard of 
mounted knights darts back and forth, finely displaying the action of 
their little stocky short-necked horses for all the world like the prancing 
steeds of Phidias' Pan-Athenaic frieze. 

After this the warriors, crazed with blood and fire, pass off to fresh 
exploits : hideous armoured footmen with faces stained like berserkers, 
bearing a coronet of dissevered heads upon their pikes. The muscles 
of their naked legs stand out in knots. 

Lastly we have a mixed group of Fujiwara unarmed courtiers and 
their convoying squadrons of troops. A chariot, presumably of their 
own Emperor, is borne in their midst. The splendid mosaic of more 
than a hundred figures moves with a slow, restrained march, the grooms 
tugging at the heads of impatient horses. The bow-men are all now in 
front, some with arrows fixed on the strings. There is evidently nervous 
suspicion of an ambush. The front of this fine procession tapers off 
like a cadence in music. A general holds in a prancing white horse 
with taut rein ; then come two staccato notes of foot-soldiers walking 
abreast ; then an isolated captain far in advance, upon a fine black 
charger which rears in fright, as if he sensed an enemy hidden in the 
grass beyond ; then one last short note of a single archer ahead, who 
peers into space with arrow set on his half-drawn string. 

The pawing action of the white horse is fine enough ; but what 
shall we say of the sudden leap of the black, which centres the whole 




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FEUDAL ART IN JAPAN 193 

van to the eye ? All four feet have left the ground at once. The 
nostril of the raised head is high in air. The rider tries to pull it 
down by a vertical rein. Though fault might possibly be found with 
some of the anatomical details of the steed, particularly if enlarged in 
photography, yet on the actual scale of only a few inches it is hardly 
possible to conceive of a more vitally rendered action, or of a greater 
beauty of gleaming curves. If this one makimono had been destroyed, 
as forty-nine fiftieths of the old Tosa works have been destroyed, our 
conception of the range of Asiatic art and even of the world's art 
would have suffered capital loss. 

In the years shortly following Yoritomo's death, his dynasty of 
Shoguns underwent, at Kamakura, the same sort of eclipse which the 
early Kioto Emperors had been dealt at the hands of the Fujiwaras. 
It was now their Hojo ministers who set up puppet chiefs and did the 
actual ruling. It was a cruel, crafty and able race, this Hojo family 
who could hold in check a hostile nation for well-nigh one hundred 
and fifty years. The tyranny, revolts, and feudal hardening of these 
days is well shown in many of the No dramas of the fifteenth century. 
They had reigned hardly more than fifty years when a supreme test of 
their strength came in resisting the threatened invasion of the Mongols, 
who by 1269 had conquered all Asia and half of Europe and were 
preparing an immense armada in China to gobble up the outlying islands. 
Hojo Tokimune, the reigning Shikken or Shogun-guardian, defied the 
great Kublai Khan by twice beheading his commissioners. When the 
crash of invasion came in the South West, Tokimune's army drove 
the landing fighters into the sea, and his navy achieved a brilliant victory 
over the crowded Chinese junks on the exact spot in the "Sea of Japan" 
where, six hundred years later, Admiral Togo was destined to destroy 
a second Tartar flotilla of Russia. It is said that Togo chose the site 
partly for this reason, not from vain sentiment either, but in firm belief 
that the souls of those defenders who died in the earlier campaign 
would be able effectually to assist the living in the latter. It was in 
the year after the Mongol invasion that Nichiren, the founder of the 
Hokkei sect, died and was buried at Ikegami, near the present Tokio. 
In 1316 a library of books, now also becoming rare, was founded at 
Kanazawa on the West coast. These are the principal events that 
happened before the advent of Godaigo Tenno and the prolonged 
wars for the Imperial restoration. 



i 9 4 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

The art of this intermediate day falls lower than the brilliant achieve- 
ments of Kenkiu. In the middle of the thirteenth century the great 
painters of the main line, now named Tosa, were Tsunetaka, the son of 
Mitsunaga, and Yoshinobu, the son of Tsunetaka. Tsunetaka's line 
is of wonderful delicacy and crispness, without at all reverting to the 
imbecility of his grandfather Takachika. He did not mass his figures 
like Keion. He sometimes worked in black and white. It is in 
landscape and his wonderfully crisp drawing of trees that we see the 
full-fledged beauty of the Tosa background. His boatman poling through 
the rapids, copied by Koyetsu, is a vigorous figure. 

Yoshimitsu essays a form which somewhat recalls Nobuzane. He has 
given us many crowded scenes, not so closely built as Keion's, but pulsing 
with a vigorous coarse life. Especially fine are his forty-eight rolls of the 
life of Honen Shonin, owned by the Imperial household of Japan. A 
group of women descending the palace steps is typical of his drawing. 
His landscape, throwing dark blue and green trees against chocolate 
coloured hills, is wonderfully free and impressionistic. This Tosa school 
of landscape is especially notable, since it so absolutely contrasts as a 
purely Japanese feature with the splendid Chinese school of Zen landscape 
that came in a century later. Yet this Japanese landscape is itself remotely 
descended from an earlier pre-Tang Chinese style of the sixth century. 
Into it, however, has been infused the characteristic drawing of pines and 
cherries and cedars whose waving plumes crest the dear familiar hills that 
surround Kioto. As we traverse the wild valleys about Kozanji, we exclaim 
again and again of the scenery : " How exactly like a Tosa landscape ! " 
and that, too, down to the minutest tawny colour. Such mountain passages 
as shown in Yoshimitsu landscape with wild cherry are the most beautiful 
landscape illumination in existence. This was a feature which the earlier 
Tosa masters deigned only to suggest. We see again in the Tosa 
gardens the little rounded hillocks and the small curving Japanese red- 
stemmed pines, the "female" pine, so different from the dark towering 
conifers of China and of the Tokugawa temples. Such little Tosa gardens 
might have been seen lingering among the monasteries of Nikko some 
thirty years ago. En-i Hogen, the painter of the fine makimonos at 
Shodaiji Nara, has left us some grand Tosa landscape effects in storm and 
snow. 

In illuminated Buddhist scripture rolls, too, we find some charming 
examples of pure Tosa decoration, nearly contemporary with Giottoesque 



FEUDAL ART IN JAPAN 195 

Gothic manuscripts. In one, a Fujiwara daimyo and his court ladies gaze 
out through an atmosphere flecked with many sized gold flakes upon a 
lotos garden. The colour is richer than the best modern lacquer. In 
another the whole decorative band is filled with coloured lotos flowers and 
leaves. It should be noted too that as early as 1229 Toshiro founded 
at Seto, in Owari, the first kiln for making artistic pottery. His dark 
brown glazes had something of Sung type in them. The lacquer work of 
the day either had Tosa landscape executed in dull gold or black, or quite 
Tosa-ish patterns of flower forms and birds inlaid in pearl upon a 
powdered gold ground. The patterns are far less stifF and conventional 
than the corresponding decoration of utensils in Fujiwara days. It was 
such impressions of garden scenes, scenes that might have been copied 
from Yoshimitsu's makimonos, that Koyetsu and Korin took for models 
in their great lacquer renaissance of the seventeenth century. 

The third and fourth generations of Tosa, Yukimitsu and Yukihiro, 
show still more of a fall. At the beginning of the fourteenth century 
Yukimitsu is more like Keion. Yukihiro is still more like him, only 
reducing Keion's myriad types to two or three and loosening the 
composition into scattered masses. It is clear that a Tosa formalism 
is eating away strength. 

It must now be mentioned that, parallel to the family schools of 
Fujiwara and Tosa, a set of descendants of both the Kose and Takuma 
painters still flourished, and these by the fourteenth century began 
to do secular work on makimons, in addition to their traditional 
manufacture of altar pieces. It was one of these Koses, Nazataka 
his full name and title being " Echizen no kami Nazataka" who has 
left us a contemporary panorama of Tokimune's destruction of the 
Mongol fleet. Kose Korehisa has left some fine large groups of 
warriors in colour. The Kose line continued to be a little harder 
and more wiry than the Tosa. By the middle of the fourteenth 
century these parallel and friendly schools began to have an influence 
upon each other, approximating more and more to a common type, 
so that it becomes difficult to tell apart, say, Tosa Yukihida, Kose 
Arishige and Takuma Rioson. 

The last stages of the first Shogunate, that is, the Kamakura 
domination, began with a new series of civil wars opening with the 
attempted freeing of the Emperor Godaigo Tenno in 1331. The 
Hojo tyrants had become most unpopular. Story and song had aroused 



196 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

pity with tales of threadbare Emperors. Godaigo himself had the 
desire to assert an independence which no Emperor had enjoyed since 
the year 900, and which no one should again enjoy until the accession 
of the present Mutsuhito in 1868. Godaigo authorized the great 
Kusunoki Masashige and Nitta Yoshisada to fight for him against 
the Kamakura usurpers. With the Imperial army was, at first, a crafty 
general, Ashikaga Takanji, who afterward became jealous of his fellow- 
conquerors of Kamakura, revolted against Kusunoki and the Emperor, 
and proclaimed himself Shogun under a Northern Emperor of his own 
choosing (1337). After three years of independence Godaigo is utterly 
defeated by Takanji, and the despairing Kusunoki, courting death, is 
killed. It was the remembered tragedy of these moving days that 
steeled the arms of Satsuma and Choshu in their war for Imperial 
restoration in 1868. Saigo Takamori was hailed as a second Kusunoki ; 
loyalty to the Emperor and hatred to the Shogun became a passion. 
Down to the Russian war Kusunoki has always been celebrated as 
the ideal samurai, and Japan's greatest hero. How far Togo and 
Nogi have now supplanted him in national affection remains to be seen. 
The followers of Kusunoki, however, would not give up the 
unequal fight, and maintained a guerilla civil warfare against Takanji 
and his successors for years, also maintaining a separate Southern 
Emperor in their fortresses about Yoshino. It was not until as late 
as 1392 that the Southern Emperor finally gave up to his suc- 
cessful rival at Kioto, thus legitimizing to all eyes the power of 
Ashikaga. It is hard to say quite when the first feudal period falls 
and the second begins. Kamakura and the Hojo fell in 1333. 
Ashikaga was proclaimed Kioto Shogun in 1337 ; but he merely kept up 
the traditions of the Kamakura court in another place. Takanji was, 
it is true, temporarily beaten by the Southern party and driven from 
Kioto in 1351, and he died in 1358 without really knowing whether 
or not he had left a successful and permanent dynasty. On the other 
hand it is not necessary for us to wait for the final collapse of the 
Southern party in 1392 in order to recognize that a permanent change 
has come. The third Ashikaga became Kioto Shogun in 1368 
Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, a powerful man with a deliberately new policy, 
who practically ruled all but a small portion of Japan. This, too, is 
the exact date of the advent of the native Chinese Ming dynasty 
which had first overthrown the Mongols. We shall adopt this date, 



FEUDAL ART IN JAPAN 197 

therefore, as not only a convenient but a real demarcation between the 
civilization and art of the Kamakura period and the Ashikaga period. 

It was in these last days of civil war that the Tosa art became 
weakest. As an example of fairly good work, we may show a copy 
of the equestrian portrait of Ashikaga Takanji, by perhaps Tosa 
Awataguchi Takanitsu. The family had now divided into many 
branches ; a new school of artists had come forward, the Shiba, whose 
style seems to be a real but weak mixture of Kose, Tosa, and 
Takuma. The descendants of the Tosa, Hirochika, and Mitsunobu 
lapsed over into solid Ashikaga days, and will be spoken of under 
Chapter XIV. 

Yet I have now, before quite closing this chapter, to speak of 
several phases of Kamakura art which went on parallel to the main 
stream of secular makimono painting which I have already described. 
I preferred to treat makimono painting first as a whole, because it 
is the most typical and striking innovation of this purely Japanese 
school. We have already seen that beside the makimono, the greatest 
artists of this school were celebrated for their portraits. It is natural 
that portraiture should have become a marked feature of a day which 
adored individuality. The finest painted portraits were those done by 
Takanobu and Nobuzane. Takanobu's great portrait of Yoritomo we 
have already mentioned. Nobuzane's famous portraits of the thirty-six 
poets are the most original things of their kind in Japan. His Ono 
no Komachi and his Hitomaro are the most celebrated. His large 
portrait of the seated Hitomaro, owned by Mr. Kawasaki, of Kobe, is 
finer than all. The individual portrait of a fat Fujiwara noble has 
been immortalized by Koyetsu's copy. His portrait of Ono no Tofu 
practising caligraphy is another fine piece of humour. Still other 
painted portraits, mostly by artists of the Takuma school, are repre- 
sentations of priests. The finest of these has been lately acquired by 
the Louvre Museum at Paris, where it is reckoned one of the supreme 
Oriental treasures. Its pure delineation suggests perfect modelling ; 
indeed it suggests the strength of a Holbein. 

But what I have in mind is that the Kenkiu people soon saw 
that sculpture might be a more effective medium for portraiture than 
painting. Sculpture had been used sparingly as a subordinate art all 
through Fujiwara days ; the revival of Jocho in the eleventh century being 
the only notable one after the introduction of mystic Buddhist painting. 



198 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

Before that, of course, Nara had made sculpture the chief medium of 
her whole culture, and with this she had executed some fine portraiture. 
But never before had sculptured portraits been made an important 
part of professional work. Of course the new sculpture that came in 
with Yoritomo was not entirely confined to portraiture, as we shall 
see in a moment. Two great men, Wunkei and Tankei, whose 
names are as familiar to every modern Japanese as Donatello and 
Michael Angelo to us, inaugurated a new school of sculpture in these 
violent days of Yoritomo ; and, since individuality was becoming the 
key note of the new life, they naturally gave great prominence to 
portraiture. In this they were followed by several generations of 
sculptors who applied their methods, but with weakening skill just 
as the Makimono painters became degenerate imitators of Keion 
down to the end of the Kamakura period. We may thus make the 
interesting generalization that what is new in the art of this third 
period of Japanese life can be summed up in historical painting and 
portrait sculpture. 

First among the many such statues that have come down to us 
portraits of priests, artists, Shoguns, guardians and temple-donors 
are the effigies of Wunkei and Tankei themselves, self-carved. Their 
medium is now entirely wood, practically ignoring the bronze, clay 
and lacquer compositions of the Yamato Era. We see Wunkei in the 
form of a somewhat round-shouldered bald-pated priest, telling his 
beads. Another portrait of a famous old priest, with a long, hard 
monkey face, is of their school.* Perhaps the finest of all in this 
line are the six seated portraits of priests that occupy the front of 
the new tiled altar of the Chukondo at Tofukuji in Nara. It was 
indeed at Nara, and as Nara sculptors, that Wunkei and Tankei 
did a great deal of their work, and an important branch of their 
disciples located at Nara ; so that Nara, through the Tosa age, became, 
with its corps of sculptors and its dramatic troupes all acting in the 
service of the temples, chiefly the Shinto-Buddhist construction of 
Kasuga-Kofukuji an even greater centre of culture than the stricken 
Kioto. Even such painters as Keion, too, went down from the capital 
to work for Nara. 

The six sculptured priests have not only great strength of 
drapery line but absolutely individualised heads, and faces working 

"This monkey-faced priest is now said by Japanese critics to be Wunkei, by himself. 



, 




PORTRAIT STATUE OF ASANGEA. 
At Kofukuji, Xara, 



PORTRAIT STATUE OF A PRIEST 




PORTRAIT STATUS OF WUNKEI. 



PORTRAIT STATUE OF Hojo, 
THE FIFTH OF THE 
KAMAKURA GUARDIANS. 



FEUDAL ART IN JAPAN 199 

in the expression of deep personal emotion. The finest, perhaps, is 
the somewhat thin individual with the broken right ear whose 
photograph we reproduce. It must be remembered that the dis- 
coloration of the flesh tones is due to the disintegration of the 
pigment with age ; but it does not hide the perfect finish of muscle, 
and tendon, and wrinkle, nor the minute veining of the hands. The 
neck, seen through the open collar of his keisa, is a specially fine 
piece of work. The earnestness of the prayer has clenched the hands 
almost to the point of swelling, There is not the slightest attempt 
at aesthetic pose. The man has fallen to his knees in absorbed 
devotion an ecstacy of mortal fear and longing and his collar has 
become disarranged in the long heat of his effort. It is indeed 
analagous to the realism of Spanish Renaissance portraits of monks, 
also done in painted wood. Compared to such Japanese portraits 
the most famous work of early Egyptian or later Assyrian artists, 
though in itself admirable enough, becomes utterly outclassed for a 
perfect primitive realism. It is interesting to note that these statues 
appear on the same altar with the imported Nara statues of the 
Indian sculpture, and with the two colossal Tang portraits of 
Asangpo and Vasabandhu, from whose style and power it is probably 
true that Wunkei derived a good part of his inspiration. Indeed, 
so alike are the two styles that some Japanese archaeologists are 
inclined to include the larger works also among the products of 
Wunkei's time. 

Another fine line of portraits are of leading Kamakura lords and 
generals, in their characteristic costume of tall, pointed lacquer hat 
and enormous baggy trousers that half conceal the feet. That which 
we reproduce is a portrait of Hojo Tokiyori, the fifth of the 
line of Kamakura guardians, who administered from 1246 to 1261. 
It is interesting to note that he sits, not upon his knees as modern 
Japanese, nor cross-legged " as a Tartar," but with his raised knees 
as far apart as possible consistently with the bringing the soles of his 
feet together in front of him. It is here that we must call atten- 
tion to the sacred sculpture, much of it extraordinarily fine, which 
Wunkei and Tankei inaugurated at the outset of the Kamakura era. 
I have not before in this chapter dwelt upon religious art, because I 
wished especially to focus attention upon the remarkable and quite 
new secular art, whose very human qualities effect the chief innovation 



200 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

in that Buddhist art which would otherwise have remained tra- 
ditional and dead. Of course even the old forms of it did not 
altogether cease. Horiuji still preserves the sect even of Suiko Tenno ; 
Yakushiji and Todaiji bring Nara worship down to our own day ; 
Shingon is still a powerful influence in Japan ; and Enriakuji of 
Hiyei-zan still boasts the succession of its Tendai popes, the last of 
whom, formerly priest of Nanshoin, was one of my Buddhist teachers. 
The demand for the old altar pieces therefore did not altogether die 
away, and there were simpler forms demanded for the new democratic 
sects. 

The best known works of Wunkei and Tankei, on these lines, 
are perhaps Buddhist " Gate Guardians (Ni-o) and Altar Guardians 
(Shi-tenno)." Of the former class the largest examples are the colossal 
statues in the great gateway of Todaiji at Nara. The most violent 
and complete in muscular and vein development are the two, life 
size, which occupy the front corners of the Chukondo altar at 
Kofukuji. Dr. Anderson of England has gone into panegyrics over 
these as the finest statues in Japan. But to our mind they are 
too mannered and distorted in their pose, and their overdone violence 
is even repulsive. Yet in knowledge of muscle, in swing of drapery 
from the waist and in force of motion, they evidently form part of the 
same epoch with Nobuzane's courtiers and Keion's soldiers. It may be 
noted that from this era onward the eyes are generally set with carved 
crystal, instead of remaining part of the basic wood. In Nara days the 
pupils of the eye only had been sometimes inlaid with a cylinder of dark 
mineral. But now white was inserted under the crystal to show the 
whole cornea. 

Of Wunkei's Shi-tenno there are many fine examples ; typical are 
those of Toindo at Yakushiji, and Seigwanji of Kioto. The whole 
group of Bodhisattwa, saints and deva, upon the central altar of Sanji 
sanji san gendo at Kioto are very fine works of a generation or two 
later. Buddhas and Amidas we have in hundreds ; some of the most 
delicate, carved of plain wood and gilded, dating from the later 
thirteenth century. But of Buddhas we must, of course, give the palm 
to the colossal bronze Buddha of Kamakura, so well known to modern 
travellers. This was erected by the efforts of a priest whose name 
is not known. It has been described by many foreign writers in 
terms of great praise ; and it has entered into English literature, both 



FEUDAL ART IN JAPAN 201 

in verse and fiction. The important thing to say about it, next to its 
size and its great feeling of calm (which belongs to all good Buddhas) is 
that its aesthetic quality is that of the type that follows in the next 
generation after Wunkei. Compared with painters, it makes me think of 
Tosa Yoshimitsu, rather than of Keion and Mitsunaga. As contrasted 
with the Nara colossus, it is far finer ; not because the art of the day 
is more enlightened than Yamato art had been ; but because while the 
Nara Buddha is the clumsy work of a decadent age the Kamakura 
bronze comes just after the culmination of its day. The former's 
place is far down a descending curve ; the latter's on the descent 
indeed, but still near the top. Very beautiful and graceful works of 
the same day are the six large Kwannons carved out of unpainted 
wood in the Roku Kwando of Northern Kioto. 

Fourteenth century sculptures of the Wunkei school are common, 
but weaker. In grotesques much charm remains, specially in the Kasuga 
lantern bearer by Kobun. Here we have a Buddhist imp, by no means a 
bad sort of fellow, in the painful muscular effort of holding up a heavy 
weight. A late fourteenth-century stage of the art, still admirable, is 
shown in the Shingon bronze group of the early mystic pilgrim, Enno 
Gioji, and his two familiar mountain spirits. Here, the weakened pro- 
portions and the unquiet surfaces, not clearly bounded in line feeling, 
show, in sculpture, the same poverty of styles which we find in con- 
temporary pictorial work with the Shiba school. From that day on 
Buddhist sculpture fell into a kind of manufacture, like Italian mosaic- 
ing, without reference to name or fame. The last professional Butsshi 
was a young man whose workshop, stocked with ancient and modern 
portraits, Buddhas and carved works, I visited in 1882 in Tera machi 
(" temple-street ") of Kioto. He died a few years later, and the 
tradition was lost, except in sporadic amateur work among a few 
Shingon and Tendai priests. 

Before closing I ought surely to refer to the parallel Buddhist work 
that was done in painting, mostly by the self-same Tosa, Kose, 
Takuma and Shiga artists who won their most original fame upon the 
secular makimono. All these artists worked at times upon hieratic altar 
pieces. With the painters that had come down from Fujiwara days 
Kasuga, Kose and Takuma such work was, of course, traditional. But 
it had fallen into extreme weakness and effeminacy before the days of 
Yoritomo ; and if it had not been for the new life-blood infused by 



202 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

secular work it would hardly be worth serious mention as a phase of 
Kamakura art. There is, of course, in the latter, plenty of formal 
weakness mere artisan persistence in the manufacture of gilt Amidas and 
flying Bodhisattwa. But besides this the age and the artists put new 
wine into the old bottles, making more human, more dramatic, more 
filled with motion, the hierarchical compositions demanded for the 
accepted sects. In short, the Tosa makimono drawing was used for it. 

Chief of this semi-new school of sacred painting were the Tosas 
themselves. Keion has left us charming often very minute views of 
the grounds and buildings of Kasuga temple at Nara, arranged as a 
Tosa landscape background, against which gilded and coloured gods 
descend, the Buddhist analogues of Shinto deities. Tsunetaka is noted 
for his whirls of the star-gods, beautiful Buddhist figures, the spirits 
of the planets, sweeping on clouds through the sky, as orbs about the 
central pole. One of the finest examples is the star-mandara of Boston, 
which 1 bought as a sacred treasure from Sumiyoshi Hirokata on his 
death-bed, along with the Takanobu Shotoku series. Another example 
is in Mr. Freer 's collection. Yoshimitsu is specially noted for his 
Shingon pieces, of which sect there was a notable revival in the thir- 
teenth century, Dai-nichis, Fudos, and Aizens. The finest pieces of 
this Tosa Mandara work are in Daigoji of Yamashino. We reproduce 
here the Yoshimitsu Dai-nichi of Boston. 

Next to the Tosa come in importance a whole new generation of 
Kose artists, probably blood descendants of Kanawoka and Hirotaka. 
Beginning with Kose Genkei in the days of Kiyomori and Yoritomo, 
they also introduced into their altar pieces, even before they essayed 
makimono, the freer drawing and the more personal spirit that the age 
demanded. A splendid example is Genkei's Jizo Mandara in Mr. 
Freer 's collection ; of which the composition is not unlike that which 
Raphael often borrowed from the Umbrian school, a gentle Jizo, of 
mixed gold and colours, seated on high on a circular halo, while 
below, relieved against a mountain background cleft with a stream, 
stand right and left in two crowds, realistic figures of devas, saints and 
kings, and a spirit, kneeling before the cleft, and in front of the two 
groups, reads from a large white scroll, thus completing the central 
axis of a magnificent composition. Fourteenth century Kose altar pieces 
become again suave and hieratic, more like the graceful Amidas, and 
Kwannons of lacquered sculpture. A Kwannon from a Yeishin-like 




THE KASUGA LANTERN-BEARER. By Kobun. 
Kasuga Temple, Nara. 






'" 



FEUDAL ART IN JAPAN 203 

trinity, with the traditional gold diaper pattern, by Kose Arishige, is in 
Detroit. The Shiba school, as of Rinken, exemplified in Boston, shows 
a late scrolly stage of prettiness, approaching the Byzantine formula of 
Mount Athos. 

A final word must now be said covering the family and school of 
the Takumas, also descended from Fujiwara days. Their history, 
though interconnected with the others, is slightly different. While they 
sometimes painted to Shingon order, their special work seems to have 
been to minister to the pictorial needs of the new Zen sect of Buddhism 
which was slowly finding its way into Japan from the Sung of China. 
It is in the next chapter that I am to speak chiefly of Zen, which already 
in Northern Sung had influenced to some extent even Ririomin. It 

O 

is enough to say that the style of Ririomin, as the Sung continuer of 
the Godoshi movement, began to pass over into Japan with the 
immigrants who founded the Zen temples. This early patronage of 
Zen was rather specially a matter of the Hpjo at Kamakura, who were 
glad to accept any spiritual makeweight against the prestige of the 
older Kioto sects. Thus the Zen temple of Kenchoji in Kamakura, 
still standing, was built by the Shikken Tokiyori, the same Hojo whose 
portrait statue we have already seen in 1253. Other great Kamakura 
Zen erections followed soon after. The great Kioto Zen temples came 
mostly after, as we shall see in Chapter XII. 

The Takuma style of this third period may be described as a mixture 
of the leaden lines and nobler proportions of Ririomin with the liveness 
and soft nervous brushwork of the Tosa. In making the combination 
they learned to spread the hairs of their soft brush to far wider strokes 
than the Tosas, in drawing the accented portions of lines. Takuma 
Shoga was the great master of this sort of work, after Kukin. He 
lived in the mountains of Takawo to the north-west of Kioto, not 
far from Kozanji, where his great set of the twelve Ten Bapteri 
Bodhisattwa are still kept. One of these, the Kwaten, or God of Fire, 
shows a fine old fellow, the hairs of whose gray head are swept out 
into the draught which the flame of his halo creates. Another, the 
moon Goddess, is of a young graceful figure seen in profile, holding 
up in a golden dish a crescent moon with a rabbit in it. The force 
of the former suggests something of a Durer drawing ; the charm of 
the latter, with its sweeping drapery lines, is like a Boticelli. The 
great Louvre portrait of a priest, probably Zen, already noted, is 



204 EPOCHS OF CHINESE AND JAPANESE ART 

probably by Shoga. His followers, Erichibo, Rioga, Rioson, Choga 
and Yeiga continued the style, at times falling closely under Kose and 
Tosa influence ; but in the main it can be said, that with the clues 
furnished by Ririomin and the first Zen apostles, Takuma art is 
really the only one of Kamakura which forms a sort of transition to 
the wave of Sung influence which in the next period overflowed the 
art of Ashikaga. 



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