The Bodhisattva’s face bears a somewhat ferocious aspect; his flesh is faintly coloured with pink. His garments are touched with pink, crimson, and olive green, while the jewellery is left uncoloured. The black hair is tied into a high topknot and descends in stylized ringlets on the shoulders. The oval nimbus and vesica are both edged with flames.
The paper painting (Ch. 00376) on the right, which belongs to the same series, is a more pleasing production. According to the Tibetan inscription below the haloed figure represents Kālika, a disciple of Śākyamuni and the fourth of the Great Apostles. He is seated on a mat, cross-legged and wrapped in a red and buff mantle lined with olive green. The right hand carries the mendicant’s bowl; the head is shaven. The monk’s features are full of character and drawn with much decision. On the right is stuck the beggar’s staff, with a bracket from which hangs his wallet.
Superior to these paintings in design and workmanship is the drawing on paper (Ch. 00145) reproduced in the middle. It shows a monk seated on a mat in meditation. His shaven head, with large, somewhat straight, features, bears an expression of firmness and concentration admirably rendered with a few fluent lines. Neither eyes nor nose and mouth bear a Chinese look. And yet the whole drawing clearly bears the impress of a Chinese artist’s brush.
The monk wears an ample mantle, and below it an under-robe with conventional cross bars marking the mendicant’s patched garb. In front are deposited his shoes, behind to the left is placed a high stoppered vase, while on a thorn-tree to the right are hung his rosary and wallet. The drawing of the tree is unmistakably Chinese in character, and the whole disposition of the little picture illustrates the mastery of spacing inherent in Chinese artistic feeling. For once we are taken away from the sphere of hieratic conventions and brought into touch with life as the eyes of the artist, or those of an earlier master, saw it.
PLATE XXXIII
PAPER PICTURES OF HERMIT AND HORSE-DRAGON
XXXIII
The two pictures on paper reproduced in this Plate on the scale of three-fourths claim interest by their subjects as well as by their artistic merit. The one on the right (Ch. 00380) presents an aged hermit with a tiger walking by his side. The hermit is represented with a face extremely wrinkled, shaggy eyebrows, deeply sunken eyes and cheeks. With his right hand he leans upon a rough staff, in his left he carries a stick ending in a Vajra and fly-whisk. He wears sandals, long spotted trousers, and two tunics, the shorter of which is spotted, has long sleeves, and reaches below the waist. His head is covered by a mushroom hat put above a skull-cap and tied under the chin by scarlet bands. On his back is seen a bundle of manuscript rolls tied in a cover and slung by a chain to a thorny branch. The attachment of this branch to the hermit’s person is not clear; but in another picture of the same subject a pole supporting the bundle is shown as carried on his right shoulder.
On the further side of the old man there advances a tiger of disproportionately small size. Both figures stand on a cloud of dark red fire, and above them in the left top corner appears a small seated Buddha, also on a cloud. The paint used for the cloud scrolls has destroyed much of the paper, and of the figure too, where it was used on it. The only other colours are grey and a light pink, distributed over the clothing and figure, while the flesh is left uncoloured. The drawing of the hermit’s figure is done with masterly skill, especially in the features, to which impressive strength is imparted by a few lines combining firmness with great freedom.
Very different in character is the picture on the left (Ch. 00150), one of the very few non-Buddhistic paintings from the ‘Thousand Buddhas’. Its subject has not been determined with certainty, but may possibly be related to the story of how the Emperor Fu-hsi, the legendary founder of the Chinese polity, first received the system of written characters from a ‘horse-dragon’.[69]