Notes on the Dated Statues of the Northern Wei Dynasty and the Beginnings of Buddhist Sculpture in China

Abstract

The dream of Emperor Ming of the statue of a golden man in the land to the west of Han and the dramatic legend of the subsequent importation of this image, although it belongs to the apocrypha of Chinese Buddhism, may be taken as symbolic of the bringing of statues from India to serve as models for the Buddhist artists of China.¹ This event is reputed to have taken place in 66 A. D. More reliable tradition places the first introduction of Buddhist images in the second century A. D.² As will be seen from the literary sources and from the actual fragments that have survived centuries of burning and purposeful destruction, the making of Buddhist images in China probably did not become general until the fourth century, until, in conjunction with the rising power of Buddhism in the fifth century, it reached such alarming proportions as to arouse the suspicions of the Taoist clergy who loosed the storm of persecution and iconoclasm under Emperor Wu.³ The religion of Sakyamuni and the art of the Buddhist church reached its first great period of florescence in China under the Northern Liang and Wei Tartar dynasties.