We are unable to say what the earliest treatment of Buddhist themes by Chinese artists was like. Buddhist images were introduced from India as early as the first century a.d., and were eagerly sought for and studied in succeeding times. Plate [xiv]—the original of which is, so far as we know, unique—is of singular interest; for it consists of a group of drawings after Indian Buddhist statues—just such as the great pilgrim of the seventh century, Hsüan-tsang, might have brought back from his long journeyings among the sacred sites of India. In the fourth century the famous painter Ku K‘ai-chih painted, we know, many Buddhist subjects, but neither the ‘Admonitions’ in the British Museum, nor the Ló-shen Fu in the Freer Collection, shows any trace of Buddhist or Indian influence; on the contrary, they show the purely native style of China in its integrity.
That purely native style is found in the paintings we are examining, but not as a rule in the treatment of the main subjects. Many of the large pictures of Paradise have borders on either side, divided into compartments, in which are painted scenes from the Jātakas or stories of the former lives of Buddha. One is reminded of the predella pictures of an Italian altar-piece. Plate [i] affords a good example, showing part of the right-hand border of the picture. And here the figures, the dresses, the landscape, the style of drawing, the spacing, are all Chinese. Were it not for the subject-matter, no one would dream of suggesting any influence from India. In the small banners, these Jātaka episodes form sometimes the entire subject, three or more scenes being usually painted one above the other. Examples are reproduced on Plate [xii], Plate [xiii], and Plate [xxxvii]. On these banners we find scenes from the legend of Śākyamuni in his last life on earth; his conception by his mother, his birth in the Lumbinī garden, his first steps, his athletic feats as a boy; his first meeting with death and sickness; his flight from the palace at midnight. Even here everything is Chinese: types, costume, architecture, pictorial conventions; it is only after Gautama has taken up his mission and begun to teach that he is represented in Indian guise, according to the traditions derived from Gandhāra.
How comes it, then, that in portraying the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, the saints and Lokapālas or Demon Kings, the Chinese painters follow so closely the Indian formula? We may suppose that just as fifteenth-century painters in Italy and the Netherlands, in representing Gospel scenes, portrayed Christ and his disciples dressed in a conventional, supposedly Oriental garb, but painted secular persons and spectators in the costume of their own time and place, so it was with these Chinese artists. And perhaps this is sufficient explanation. Yet, when we remark what fidelity to Gandhāran models was observed, once the Chinese artists had come to know them; when we remember that the Jātaka scenes were frequent subjects of the school of Gandhāra and were of course treated in the same style as the Bodhisattvas; and when we consider that Buddha himself, in his youth, is portrayed in these banner paintings as a Chinese boy in Chinese dress, we may be tempted by another hypothesis. We may suppose that when the Buddha-legends were first illustrated by Chinese painters they were known by written and oral tradition only, and that the painters, having no models to fall back upon, painted the chosen scenes in their own way and according to their own lights; and this style, this treatment, once fixed, remained. It might be that the tradition thus formed (which, be it noticed, is continued in Japanese art throughout) represents an earlier phase of Buddhism, when the Buddha-legend was more prominent in the mouths of missionaries than the worship of the Bodhisattvas. But all this is conjecture, and the simpler explanation may be the right one.
At any rate, what we have to note is the fact that Chinese painting had already developed a powerful genius of its own, and, however much it borrowed, was able to fuse its borrowings in its own style. But before dealing with this question of the fusion of Indian subject-matter in Chinese style, let us complete what there is to say about the purely Chinese features in the Tun-huang paintings.
Besides the illustrations of Jātaka-legends, there are at the foot of many of the pictures portraits of their donors. These are most valuable documents for the student of Chinese painting; for they give us portraits of people actually living at a certain date, they show us what costume they wore—thereby often helping us to determine the approximate date of undated pictures—and they afford more than a hint of the prevalent style of drawing in secular art.
Every one who has studied the earlier art of China knows how difficult it is to find a really trustworthy starting-point for dating pictures and arriving at a sound conception of the style of a given period. We have usually only an ancient tradition, at the best, of date and authorship. But here we have dated work, from which we can start.
Among the paintings reproduced is one, ‘Four Forms of Avalokiteśvara’ (Pl. [xvi]), which bears a date corresponding to the year a.d. 864. This is the earliest date found on any of the paintings. Others bear dates of the late ninth and early tenth centuries.
Comparing the picture reproduced on Plate [xvi] with other pictures which are not dated, we can have little hesitation in assigning the great majority of the paintings to the second half of the Tang dynasty (seventh to tenth centuries) and towards its close, though it would be rash to attempt any minute determination of dates, for reasons already given.
We know nothing certain of Chinese painting before Tang times, except the painting in the British Museum, ‘Admonitions of the Instructress in the Palace’, and the ‘Ló-shen Fu’ in the Freer Collection, both ascribed to Ku K‘ai-chih. Whether either of these be allowed to be an original of the fourth century or not, there can be no doubt that they represent the style of that period in its main characteristics: they show a great mastery of expressive drawing of the human figure, an extraordinary command of finely modulated, sinuous line, a love of it both for its own sake and as expressive of movement, and a quite primitive and rudimentary treatment of landscape.
The paintings we are now considering afford no adequate material for comparison; but one thing is at once noticeable, and that is the altered ideal of the human form; in place of the tall, slender proportions of Ku K‘ai-chih, T‘ang art substitutes shorter and more massive proportions. An ideal of power has superseded an ideal of grace.