Lost Buddhas
China's latest exports are 1400 years old and lay buried for 800. Nick Dent gets enlightened about the Lost Buddhas
On the top floor of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, stone figures are lying flat in open, coffin-shaped wooden boxes, like the victims of a Wild West shoot-out. Agonisingly slowly, a hydraulic lifter raises one from repose, and five men gingerly position its serene form upright in a base filled with sand. The lost Buddhas of Qingzhou are coming back to life.
"They're made from a very fine green limestone that permits very precise carving," says Dr Liu Yang, the AGNSW's curator of Chinese art. He indicates the pattern of red and green squares on the gown of one reposing Buddha. It's designed to resemble a rice field, signifying that whoever offers gifts or hospitality to a holy person can expect to ‘reap the fields' of virtue. It's added-value marketing, Northern Qi dynasty-style. "When they were excavated, the archaeologists were amazed by the very well-preserved colour pigments," Liu says.
The Lost Buddhas features some of the best examples of sixth century Buddhist art in existence. The 35 exhibits in the show are among about 400 that were unearthed by construction workers from a shallow pit in Qingzhou, Shandong province, in 1996. Considered a discovery almost as exciting as the uncovering of the terracotta warriors of Xi'an, the statues, found broken into large pieces, were buried some time during the 12th century.
The reassembled Buddhas were first displayed at the National Museum in Beijing in 1999, which was when Liu and the director of the AGNSW, Edmund Capon, first saw them. "We were both in Beijing for the negotiation on [last year's Translucent World] jade show and we were amazed by these works," Liu says. They had to wait for the Buddhas to tour Europe and America before they could bring them to Sydney in a show they curated themselves. "Edmund is also a specialist in Buddhist art so we both selected the 35 works from the museum in Qingzhou."
The Buddhas fall into two categories: ‘stele', sculptures involving a central Buddha accompanied by two bodhisattvas (enlightened teachers) on a background slate; and individual Buddha statues. "A stele is like a teaching aid," says Liu. "It has information about Buddhism carved on the plinth, it's designed to be erected in a public area to help people to learn. Then during the sixth century the steles gradually died out and a kind of freestanding statue became more popular purely as an icon for people to worship."
So why were the Buddhas broken up and buried in the first place? The most widely credited theory is that they were destroyed in an anti-Buddhist drive by the Song Emperor Huizong, who reigned 1109 to 1125 and favoured Taoism over Buddhism. As the burial appeared to be ceremonial, it's conjectured that monks collected the fragments and interred them to preserve them from further harm. However, no such purges are part of recorded history. "What Huizong did was demote Buddhism rather than persecute it," Liu says. "So we don't really have a satisfying answer."
The Lost Buddhas are on display at the AGNSW from August 29.
A major international symposium, Chinese Buddhist Art: New Directions & Perspectives, takes place 29-30 Aug.