Chinese Buddhist Sculpture
The assignment needs to answer four questions. 1.Please describe three different styles of Chinese Buddhist sculpture that appeared from the 3rd century through the 8th century. Please relate the formal features of each style to a particular work, identifying the work clearly. 2.How have Chinese works of art discussed in lecture articulated Buddhist beliefs about bodhisattvas and arhats? How do the works make those beliefs vivid to viewers? Please be sure to cite several works and note specific elements and/or features of those works. 3.Please characterize at least two different ways in which paintings of places (specific places or generic ones) have articulated Chinese Buddhist understandings about the world and how people relate to it (e.g with regard to their condition as sentient beings, how to escape that condition, etc.). For the purposes of this question, “the world” can include both the immediate environment in which people lived and the larger Buddhist world system or cosmos. Please be sure to support your answer by citing features of particular works that were presented in lecture. 4.Why do sculptures and paintings associated with Chan Buddhism frequently portray human figures who are not buddhas or bodhisattvas? What ideals do such works illustrate or express? How varied might those ideals be? Please be sure to support your answer by referencing specific examples from lecture and (optionally) the assigned reading. For question 3 and 4, you can only use the sources from: (and the screenshots I uploaded) 1.Dudbridge, Glen. “Buddhist Images in Action: Five Stories from the Tang. 2.Pekarik, Andrew J. and Stephanie Stokes. “The Cave Temples of Dunhuang. 3. Bloom, Phillip E. “Ghosts in the Mists: The Visual and the Visualized in Chinese Buddhist Art, ca. 1178. 4.Brinker, Kanazawa, and Leisinger, “About the Essence of Zen, “About the History of Zen,and “Zen Aesthetics and Theory of Art. Read: Berger, Patricia. “Preserving the Nation: The Political Uses of Tantric Art in China.
