The "Religion of Images"? Buddhist Image Worship in the Early Medieval Chinese Imagination.

• Author: Greene, Eric M.
• Position: Essay

INTRODUCTION

Religious icons and their associated beliefs and practices have been central to Chinese Buddhist life at all points in its history. Whether we turn to contemporary ethnography, ancient literary sources, or the material record itself, Buddhist sacred images are there and Chinese Buddhists are worshiping them, manufacturing them, and attributing them with power.

Images with Buddhist iconography were first produced in China no later than the second century CE, as early as, or perhaps even earlier than, the first Chinese translations of Indian Buddhist texts. Surviving examples from this period are for the most part small, Buddha-like figures incorporated into the design of Chinese funerary wares. (1) Though the actual purpose of these objects is unclear, and their immediate ritual context was not necessarily "Buddhist" in any meaningful sense (Wu 1986), textual evidence records Buddhist forms of image worship taking place among Chinese patrons of Buddhism as early as the late second century. (2) Actual examples of freestanding Buddhist icons designed for ritual worship survive, in increasing numbers, from the late third century. (3)

Chinese Buddhists interacted with their sacred images in diverse ways. They made offerings to them, composed poems in praise of them, (4) told stories about their divine power and the misfortune befalling those who despoiled them (Gjertson 1981: 297), carried out city-wide rituals of image-procession (Tsukamoto 1985: 272-77), and gained religious merit from their manufacture, (5) which by the early fifth century began to take on the massive proportions still seen today in the cave shrines of Binglingsi, Maijishan, Dunhuang, Longmen, and Yun-gang, among many other sites. Though episodes of rhetorical and actual hostility towards Buddhist images did occasionally break out among opponents of Buddhism in China and elsewhere in East Asia (Rambelli and Reinders 2012), the Chinese Buddhist tradition itself rarely if ever called the worship of images into question. (6)

Many modern scholars have also proposed that not only were sacred images crucially important to Chinese Buddhists, but also that Buddhism itself introduced to China fundamentally new ideas about such objects and their powers. As John Kieschnick (2003: 58-59) observes:

Evidence for sacred icons in China before the entrance of Buddhism is as sketchy as it is for sacred icons in pre-Buddhist India... although images existed in ancient China, they were rarely attributed with divine power. And the peculiar idea that a powerful deity could be induced to inhabit a man-made likeness was not common, if it existed at all... just a few centuries after the arrival of Buddhism, all of this changed dramatically, as the countryside was quickly populated with images that not only represented deities but were also deities themselves, capable of profoundly affecting the lives of those around them. As Kieschnick goes on to note, both physical and textual evidence suggests that in pre-Buddhist China painted or sculpted images used for religious purposes were not focal points of worship, but were placed in tombs. Above-ground ancestral sacrifice, the model for many other forms of religious worship, used only a tablet bearing the written name of the deceased. (7) Though the general lack of above-ground archaeological remains from pre-Buddhist China is worth remembering, Kieschnick's point is still well taken: sacred icons appear to rise to prominence in China precisely when Buddhism was first gaining a foothold. Some scholars have seen evidence for Buddhist influence on Chinese image practices beginning from as early as the second century, when we first find Chinese gods and ancestors depicted in an "iconic" (front-facing) pose that some art historians have interpreted as presuming a context of worship. (8)

But in addition to positing Buddhism as the source of a broader cultural shift towards religious image worship in China, modern scholars have also frequently proposed the stronger thesis that this influence was apparent to the Chinese themselves. According to Erik Zurcher, Buddhist approaches to sacred images were "so characteristic and so radically different from the pre-Buddhist Chinese heritage, that they retained their specific Buddhist identity." (9) In this view, the key practices and ideologies associated with Buddhist image worship--Zurcher here mentions specifically the veneration of sacred beings in painted or sculpted form and the belief that the construction of such images would generate merit--were in China marked as distinctly Buddhist, at least for a time, just as were other initially novel Buddhist beliefs and practices such as celibate monasticism or the concept of rebirth.

Yet we should pause to consider whether Buddhist image practices actually were radically different from "the pre-Buddhist Chinese heritage" and whether, assuming, for the moment, that this was so, this would necessarily imbue them with a distinct identity. Identity, after all, is not simply given in raw difference, but must be actively constructed by those who claim it or attribute it to others, and China was not so insular, as scholars perhaps once assumed, that anything novel or foreign always and immediately stood out. (10) To assess whether particular Buddhist practices and ideologies were or were not the bearers or markers of a distinct identity therefore requires looking beyond their putative or actual novelty within the Chinese world to the particular ways that they were, or were not, actively conceived as Buddhist by the medieval Chinese. It is this question of the supposedly distinct identity of Buddhist image practices in China that I will take up below, both as a topic of intrinsic historical interest and also as a way to consider certain broader questions about how religious and other identities are constructed and the way that cultural influence, real and imagined, is experienced and represented.

My argument, which will be based primarily on a close investigation of how the worship of sacred images is discussed in literary sources, (11) can be stated easily in advance--that the worship of sacred icons was in China first singled out as a distinctly Buddhist practice only in the late fifth century. This idea thus gains currency only long after the worship of sacred icons had been fully accepted as part of many if not most forms of Chinese religion, and is moreover presented within a polemical context that should make us question just how widespread it ever truly became. The history of the Chinese conception of image worship does not, I will thus suggest, necessarily map smoothly onto the history of Chinese image worship itself.

THE "RELIGION OF IMAGES" (XIANGJIAO [phrase omitted])

Names, to paraphrase Confucius, are important. For good reason, then, modern scholars discussing Chinese Buddhist images have often noted that Buddhism itself was known in China as the "religion of images" (xiangjiao), (12) a designation that can only have been coined (it is suggested) because Buddhism's emphasis on such objects and their associated practices was seen as distinctive, or that Buddhism was believed to have introduced sacred icons to China, or at the very least because image worship was somehow marked as a characteristically Buddhist activity in the same way as were practices such as celibate monasticism that had no counterpart in pre-Buddhist China. (13)

Yet the history of this name xiangjiao is somewhat more complicated than has been appreciated. This history is worth examining both for its own sake and also because, as we shall see, "the religion of images" turns out not to have been simply a generic and widely used designation for Buddhism, indicative of how it was ever and always perceived in China, but a polemical term of abuse first deployed by anti-Buddhist Chinese authors in the late fifth century. Tracing this history will serve as a first step towards charting what I will suggest was indeed a broader change that took place in the late fifth century, one in which image worship was for the first time identified as not just an important Buddhist practice but as distinctively Buddhist.

Most of the major modern dictionaries of literary Chinese include an entry for xiangjiao, where it is defined as "the religion of images" and said to have been a generic name for "Buddhism." (14) Yet as Paul Pelliot (1928) pointed out many years ago (in a short article overlooked by most later scholars), the examples cited by these dictionaries do not actually support this interpretation. The earliest passage mentioned is invariably the Dhuta Temple Inscription (Touduosi bei ming [phrase omitted]) of Wang Jin [phrase omitted] (d. 505), (15) where commenting on the fate of Buddhism in India after the death of the Buddha he writes that: "the true teaching having already perished, the xiangjiao too then began to decline" [phrase omitted], [phrase omitted] (Wen xuan [phrase omitted] 59.812).

As Pelliot observed, xiangjiao here means neither "the religion of images" nor even "Buddhism" tout court. Relevant here is, rather, the technical meaning of xiangjiao as a Chinese translation of saddharma-pratirupaka ("the semblance of the true teaching"), an eschatological term from Indian Buddhism denoting a historical period beginning roughly 500 years after the Buddha's demise in which, it was argued, the "true teaching" (saddharma) of Buddhism will have disappeared with only its "semblance" (pratirupaka) remaining. (16)

The concept of the "semblance teachings" appears in Chinese Buddhist texts, beginning from the late third century, (17) in a variety of similar but slightly different expressions. (18) East Asian Buddhist dictionaries duly note these many terms and include the concept of the "semblance teachings" under their definitions of xiangjiao. Yet these Buddhist dictionaries also further give, as an additional meaning for xiangjiao in particular...