Where the road began
By the first century CE Buddhist art had found its two faces in India: a Buddha with a classical look in Gandhara, in today’s Pakistan and Afghanistan, and a fuller, Indian Buddha at Mathura. Gandhara mattered most for what came next, because it sat on the trade routes that ran from north-western India towards northern China. Kanishka, a king of the Kushan dynasty that ruled northern India, Afghanistan and parts of Central Asia, is said to have encouraged the spread of Buddhism and to have patronised the art of Gandhara.
Images could travel too. Later, pilgrims carried small metal Buddhas of the Gupta period along the Silk Road to China, and with them a model of what the Buddha should look like.
Across Central Asia
The Silk Roads were a web of many routes. As the crow flies they stretched about 7,500 km, but the routes themselves added up to more than 35,000 km, and from the second century BCE the exchange along them grew fast. Buddhism probably reached the oasis kingdoms of the Tarim Basin, such as Khotan and Kucha, by the beginning of the Common Era, and it flourished there until the eleventh century.
One of the stopping places was the valley of Bamiyan, high in the Hindu Kush of central Afghanistan, on a branch of the route between China and India. Two giant standing Buddhas, about 55 and 38 metres high and believed to date from the sixth century, were cut into its cliff. Their art mixed Indian, Hellenistic, Roman and Sasanian influences, the last from Persia under the Sasanians. Murals of the seventh century in the caves around them are among the earliest examples of oil painting in the world. The two statues were destroyed by the Taliban in March 2001.
Into China
How Buddhism reached China is partly legend. According to tradition, the Han emperor Mingdi, who reigned in the first century CE, dreamed of a flying golden god, sent envoys to India, and received a Buddhist text that was kept in a temple outside his capital, Luoyang. More probably, Buddhism entered China gradually, first through Central Asia and later along the sea routes around South-East Asia. The first translators even borrowed the vocabulary of Daoism to make the new ideas understandable.
The gateway was Dunhuang, the oasis where the two branches of the Silk Road forked. Monks began cutting the Mogao Caves into a cliff there in 366, and they kept going for a thousand years: 492 caves survive, with about 45,000 square metres of murals and more than 2,000 painted sculptures. Their style blends Chinese painting with models from India and Gandhara, and one mural of the Sui dynasty, in Cave 302, shows a camel pulling a cart, as on the trade missions of the time.
In the fifth century the Northern Wei, a dynasty that ruled northern China, turned Buddhism into a state art. At Yungang, near Datong, the monk Tan Yao directed the carving of five huge caves on imperial orders, and by the early sixth century the site had 252 caves and niches with about 51,000 statues. The forms came from South and Central Asia, but Yungang gave them a distinctly Chinese character. When the Wei moved their capital to Luoyang, carving began at Longmen, which grew to more than 2,300 caves and niches and almost 110,000 statues, up to the colossal figures of the Tang dynasty in the Fengxiansi Cave.
From China to Korea
Buddhism crossed into the Korean peninsula from China in the fourth century CE, when it was divided into three kingdoms. It arrived first in the northern kingdom of Koguryŏ and spread to Paekche and Silla, accepted first by the court and then by the people. Korean workshops cast images in gilt bronze, among them seated bodhisattvas lost in thought, known as “pensive” bodhisattvas.
The buildings changed shape on the way as well. The Indian stupa, a solid dome over the relics, turned in China, Korea and Japan into the multistorey pagoda, while keeping the same idea of a monument built around a relic.
Japan’s first Buddhist art
Buddhism reached Japan from Korea in the sixth century. The Asuka period, traditionally dated from 552 to 645, begins with its arrival. Not everyone welcomed it: some blamed the foreign statues for plagues and disasters, as an insult to the native gods. The powerful Soga clan took up the new faith, defeated its rivals in 587, and Prince Shōtoku, regent from 593, gave Buddhism official support.
The first great Japanese sculptor came from an unexpected trade. Kuratsukuri Tori belonged to the guild of saddlemakers and applied his skill in gilt bronze saddle fittings to statues of the Buddha. He made a bronze Great Buddha for the Asuka Temple, completed in 606, and the Shaka Triad, the historical Buddha with two attendants, completed in 623 for the Golden Hall of Hōryū-ji. His bronzes look as if they were cut in stone, because his models were the cave sculptures of the Northern Wei.
Hōryū-ji itself, founded by Prince Shōtoku near Nara and later rebuilt, keeps buildings from the late seventh or early eighth century that are among the oldest surviving wooden buildings in the world. They adapt Chinese Buddhist architecture to Japan. In the Nara period (710-784) Buddhism became the state religion, and Emperor Shōmu made the capital, with its Great Buddha, the centre of the national cult.
What changed, and what stayed the same
Almost everything about the look of the Buddha changed on the way: faces, robes, materials and the architecture around him. A Gandhara Buddha recalls a Roman statue; a Wei Buddha at Yungang has a Chinese character; a bronze by Tori translates Chinese stone into Japanese metal. What travelled unchanged were the marks of the Buddha, the bump on the head and the long earlobes, the gestures of the hands, and the stories carved and painted around him. That is why you can recognise him from Mathura to Nara.
Where to see it
In China, the Mogao Caves at Dunhuang, the Yungang Grottoes near Datong and the Longmen Grottoes near Luoyang are all UNESCO World Heritage Sites, and so is Hōryū-ji in Nara Prefecture. In New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art has the Northern Wei Maitreya of 486 and the Korean pensive bodhisattva.
Sources
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Buddhism: Central Asia and China”, “Buddhism: Korea and Japan”, “Asuka period”, “Kuratsukuri Tori”, “Bamiyan”, “stupa”.
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “Silk Roads: the Routes Network of Chang’an-Tianshan Corridor” (1442), “Cultural Landscape and Archaeological Remains of the Bamiyan Valley” (208), “Mogao Caves” (440), “Yungang Grottoes” (1039), “Longmen Grottoes” (1003), “Buddhist Monuments in the Horyu-ji Area” (660).
- V. Dehejia, “Buddhism and Buddhist Art”, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (2007).
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, collection records 26.123, 2003.222, 30.32.37.
