In 1962, the National Palace Museum in Taipei exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and for the first time for a special work, the museum opened two exhibition rooms so that the whole volume could be opened. Dr. Gao Juhan, an expert in Chinese art history in United States, also came to watch, and in the face of the squirming and moving visitors, Gao Juhan smiled and said, "I only have to buy a bicycle, so I can only ride like this and look past people." This work that has attracted much attention is the "Sanskrit Scroll" that is more than 16 meters long and has a history of more than 800 years.
This precious painting scroll was exhibited again due to the formation of the National Treasure in Taipei in 2017 - the special exhibition of calligraphy and painting, but due to space constraints, the first half of the exhibition can only be exhibited in the second half of the exhibition, and then the first half will be exhibited. Being able to see the original up close is an experience unlike any other way to see it.
The full name of the volume is "Song Dynasty Dali National Painter Zhang Shengwen Painting Sanskrit Volume", about 1172 ~ 1176 (the eighth year of the Southern Song Dynasty - the third year of Chunxi), the original album 134 open, each open width of about 12 cm, later modified into a long volume, divided into 4 sections.
Song Dynasty Dali Guo Zhang Shengwen "Sanskrit Statue Volume" part of the "Lizhen Emperor Ritual Buddha Picture" National Palace Museum, Taipei
Song Dynasty Dali Guo Zhang Shengwen "Sanskrit Statue Volume" part of the "Lizhen Emperor Ritual Buddha Picture" National Palace Museum, Taipei
The first paragraph depicts the Buddha of Duan Zhixing, the king of Dali and the emperor Lizhen. For friends who are familiar with Jin Yong's martial arts novels, Duan Zhixing should be no stranger, because he is the Southern Emperor in "The Legend of the Condor Heroes". The book on the upper left "Emperor Lizhen's Glance Letter" shows that it was written by Duan Zhixing himself.
Part of the second paragraph of Zhang Shengwen's "Sanskrit Statue Volume" in Dali in the Song Dynasty
Part of the second paragraph of Zhang Shengwen's "Sanskrit Statue Volume" in Dali in the Song Dynasty
The second section depicts hundreds of Buddhist figures and is the main body of the volume.
The third paragraph of Zhang Shengwen's "Sanskrit Statue Volume" in Dali in the Song Dynasty
The third paragraph of Zhang Shengwen's "Sanskrit Statue Volume" in Dali in the Song Dynasty
The third paragraph paints many hearts and protects the national treasure.
The fourth paragraph of the Sanskrit Imagery Volume
The fourth paragraph of the Sanskrit Imagery Volume
The fourth section depicts the Buddha of the Sixteen Kings.
Each section is framed and separated by aya. The whole volume is painted in gold and color, depicting more than 790 Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, Venerables, Dharma Protectors, gods, kings and followers, 94 animals of various kinds, drawing Seiko and rich in content.
From the analysis of details, this is a multi-person collaborative scroll, and the main members are Duan Zhixing and Zhang Shengwen, the former completed the "Lizhen Emperor Lizhen Buddha Map", and the latter led the painting of other parts.
The Kingdom of Dali was a large country on the southwestern border of the Song Dynasty, and its territory was roughly in what is now Yunnan Province. In view of the fact that the demise of the Tang Dynasty was related to the Southern Zhao, Song Taizu drew the Dadu River on the map with a jade axe and said, "In addition, I don't have it." Since then, the Dali Kingdom and the Song Kingdom have been bounded by the Dadu River.
Zhang Shengwen's year of birth and death cannot be examined, and there is no record in the history of painting, but it is only known that he was the painter of Duan Zhixing, Emperor Lizhen of Dali (reigned in 1172~about 1199). As for the clan of the Zhang family, it is also unclear, and some scholars believe that the Zhang family may be from the Central Plains, or the ancestors came from Shu and were painters with Han Chinese ancestry. Other scholars believe that although there is no record of Zhang's lineage, after the painting of the "Sanskrit Scroll", Zhang Shengwen asked the famous monk Miaoguang to inscribe the inscription, which is the first inscription after the volume.
According to the rules of the historical books of Nanzhao and Dali, the famous outsiders are separately indicated, and the text says that he is "Dali National Painter", and the description is the meaning of painting people, and there is no annotation. In addition, Yang Xiaodong, a Dali scholar, believes that Zhang is one of the great surnames of the Bai nationality, and "Shengwen" is difficult to interpret according to the Chinese interpretation, if it is pronounced "shou-wen" and read in the vernacular, it is "the person who shapes the Buddha statue", and there are Bai painters before Zhang because of their exquisite painting skills in the records, so it can be basically determined that he is a Bai nationality and a native of Dali.
Judging from the painting style of this volume, it has the painting tradition of the Central Plains, revealing the residual charm of the Tang Dynasty, and the brushwork of the Song people embodied in the painting, if viewed in combination with historical documents, reflects the strategy of Song Taizu to take the Dadu River as the boundary, and did not completely isolate and hinder the political, economic and cultural exchanges between Dali and the Song Dynasty.
In the first section of the picture scroll, Emperor Lizhen's Buddha is steady, the colors are bright, the proportions of the characters are accurate, and the expression is vivid.
Emperor Lizhen
Emperor Lizhen
The emperor wears a red silk head bag, a crown robe, and a gold tie around his waist, which is exactly the same as the image of the emperor in the Shizhongshan Grottoes in Yunnan Province.
Dali civil official
Dali civil official
The civil officials of Dali wore a silk head bag and a gorgeous robe.
General
General
soldier
soldier
The generals wore Polo (tiger) skins, and the soldiers wore buns, rhino skin armor, and stomped feet.
These clothing features are consistent with those contained in the Tang and Song Dynasty documents, and are the most specific information for understanding the official system and customs of Nanzhao and Dali.
Landscape in the background of Emperor Lizhen's Buddha picture
Landscape in the background of Emperor Lizhen's Buddha picture
The landscape of the background, some scholars have verified that the nineteen peaks of Cangshan Mountain are dyed with ink and brush, and the master and slave are distinct, then there is an elegant landscape painting of Dali in the Buddhist painting, which complements each other and is very precious, and also shows that Duan Zhixing has a superb level of painting.
Nanzhao and Dali are located between the Tang and Song dynasties, Tibet and Southeast Asia, and because of their geographical location, the painting styles are diverse and the sources are complex. The second paragraph, which is the main body of the volume, contains hundreds of Buddhist figures, rich in imagery, and compatible. Those who belong to the manifest teaching system include the sixteen Arhats, the statue of the Zen patriarch, the Maitreya Sanhui, the Medicine Master Liuliguang Buddha Association, and the Pumen Pin Guanyin. Those who belong to the Esoteric system are the Great Pessimistic Guanyin, the Eleven-Faced Guanyin, the Secret Five Puxian, and the Buddha Mother of the Mahari Branch.
As far as the painting style is concerned, such as the compositions of Manjushri Vima, Maitreya Sanhui, Medicine Master Liuli Light Buddha, Pumen Pin Guanyin, etc., it is obvious that the layout of the Tang and Song dynasties is disguised, and the shape of the figures and the operation of the brushstrokes are also very similar to the Tang and Song Taoist paintings, showing a close relationship with Song paintings.
Some of the figures in the images, such as the Buddha of the Buddha of Shakyamuni Buddha, are similar to the figures in Tibetan Buddhist paintings. There are also some figures whose postures, such as the real body Guanyin, are similar to the bodhisattva statues in Southeast Asia.
In addition, there are special local Buddhist images belonging to Nanzhao and Dali, such as the sage Mai Sheng, Mahara, the Buddhist monk Guanyin, the founding of Guanyin, the real body Guanyin, the Yichang Guanyin, the golden bowl Jialuo God, the Daan medicine fork and so on. These images are magnificent, and among the few existing cultural relics of Nanzhao and Dali, they have become valuable materials for studying Buddhism in this region.
The fifth opening of the Brahmanic Image
The fifth opening of the Brahmanic Image
When watching the original work, in the fifth opening of the second paragraph, "The Left Ruling Dragon", I found a detail that I had not noticed before, and there were several immortals in the cloud above the head of the Heavenly King. On the right, a wrestler is naked, carrying a large tiger skin bag, and next to him is an old man in white clothes, holding a basin in his left hand and a branch in his right hand, as if he is sprinkling water. On the upper left, a middle-aged woman, holding a bronze mirror in each hand, stared at the fierce and evil person in the middle, as if waiting for a unified order.
Four gods
Four gods
The appearance and demeanor of the people who are surrounded by it are just like the "fear of beasts" of the Northern and Southern Dynasties, the head of the beast is human, the wings are spread, the tiger is eyeing, from the ring row 4 small drums, both hands holding the black pole can be seen, this is the image of the thunder gong angry and leading the drum. The ancients mostly compared the sound of the drum to the sound of thunder, and Dongfang Shuo's "Miraculous Record" has "the stone drum in the side of the eight wildernesses, its path is thousands of miles, and the sound of hitting it is thunder, and the sky takes it as the power of joy and anger."
This appearance of the four gods in the painting is not much in the works of later generations, and it is for the four gods of Fengshi, Yubo, Lei Gong, and Electric Mother who were earlier in the era, among which the images of Lei Gong and Fengshi are more common in Japan paintings.
The picture of the 4 immortals is 12 centimeters square, the characters are very finely drawn, in the corner below the electric mother, there is a yellow-clothed man with a serious expression, looking up at the gods and immortals on the upper floor, holding a scroll in his left hand, and the common appearance is different from the unfolded scroll, there are several pages in the unfolded volume that are rolled out in turn, at first glance it looks like a slightly curved sawtooth. This kind of image has never been seen elsewhere, and it is incomprehensible. However, from the right hand holding the pen to write a book, it can be seen that this is a scroll used for recording, this man in yellow is the identity of the scribe next to the judge of hell in the popular "Ten Kings" of the Tang and Song dynasties.
From this line of thought, it suddenly dawned on me that this was not the binding form of the early books, the dragon scale suit or the whirlwind suit? This form uses a long strip of paper as the base paper, and the inner end is equipped with a small wooden stick as the axis, and the pages of the same size are gradually pasted on the bottom paper, and then rolled into a roll, and the open pages are curled like dragon scales, so it is named. If the pages of the book with different lengths are pasted at one end, the roll is called a "whirlwind suit", and the two are much the same.
This very old form of book binding, because "where the text has a ready for inspection, the scroll is difficult to count the scrolls, so it is written in leaves" (Ouyang Xuan's "Returning to the Field" volume 2), when it was influenced by the Sanskrit folder, and a kind of improvement of the scroll binding, which is about 700 years earlier than the current line-bound book style.
Tang (biography) Wu Cailuan's "Cutting Rhyme" is a dragon scale decoration in the collection of the Palace Museum
Tang (biography) Wu Cailuan's "Cutting Rhyme" is a dragon scale decoration in the collection of the Palace Museum
At present, the Forbidden City in Beijing has a volume of "Cut Rhyme" written by Wu Cailuan in the Tang Dynasty, which is a dragon scale outfit, which is a lone example of heirloom and extremely precious. In addition, Dunhuang has unearthed a number of fragments of dragon scales or whirlwind suits. There is a 38-page album of "Tang Yun" in the National Palace Museum in Taipei, and from the traces of this mounting, it was undoubtedly a dragon scale or a whirlwind, but later generations have been converted into albums.
Tang Dynasty (Biography) Wu Caiyu's book "Tang Rhyme" National Palace Museum, Taipei
Tang Dynasty (Biography) Wu Caiyu's book "Tang Rhyme" National Palace Museum, Taipei
And the "Sanskrit Picture Volume" this picture just corroborates with it, if combined with the literature, it is the triple evidence of the document, the real thing, and the image, which is unpleasant and extremely valuable, and can naturally become an important material in the history of book binding, and I have the impression that this is also the only ancient image material of the dragon scale binding found at present.
There is also an interesting place in the portrait of the Zen patriarch in the scroll, which is also related to the university scholar Hu Shi, which is the statue of the seventh master of the Shenhui.
In the history of Zen Buddhism in China, the Shenhui occupies an important place. Chinese Zen Buddhism to the Northern Wei Dynasty to China Bodhidharma as the first ancestor, through Hui Ke, Seng Chan two generations of transmission, to Daoxin, Hongren formally formed Zen Buddhism "Dongshan Method", but since then it has become the mainstream of Zen Buddhism is founded by Hongren disciple Hui Neng Nanzong. This major change and development of Zen Buddhism is inseparable from the efforts of the Huineng Disciple Shenhui.
Shenhui (684~758 years), the common surname is Gao, Xiangyang (the county is governed in Xiangfan City, Hubei) people, since childhood from the teacher to learn Confucian scriptures, and read "Lao" and "Zhuang", after leaving home, Jingzhou Dangyang Yuquan Temple Shenxiu disciple to learn Zen for 3 years. After Huineng's death, the gods would go to Longxing Temple in Nanyang (now Deng County, Henan Province) to live and preach the Dharma, and was respected as "Nanyang Monk". He took advantage of this opportunity to interact closely with court officials and scholars, and widely publicized the Zen teachings of the Southern Sect.
In the process of quelling the "Anshi Rebellion" in the imperial court, due to military needs, funds were raised by selling officials and lords and setting up ordination altars and monks in various places. Because of its fame, the Divine Society was also invited to preside over the monks, and was rewarded by the imperial court for meritorious service. Tang Suzong entered the inner dojo to make offerings, and sent someone to build a meditation room for him in Luoyang's Heze Temple. In the twelfth year of the reign of Emperor Dezong of Tang Dynasty (796), it was officially recognized by the imperial court as the orthodoxy of Zen, respecting Huineng as the sixth ancestor, Shenhui as the seventh ancestor, and respecting as "Master Heze".
In 1926, Hu Shi first discovered the "Quotations of the Monks of the Shenhui" and "The Theory of the Determination of the Rights and Wrongs of the Bodhidharma Nanzong" in the Dunhuang testaments in Paris and London, and found a total of 3 volumes of materials and 1 fragment of the Shenhui in London, including the "Records of the Manifest Sect" of the Shenhui, about 20,000 words of information about the monks of the Shenhui, and felt that it would be difficult to write a good history of Zen Buddhism if he did not write about the Shenhui. "For more than a thousand years, almost no one knew about God's place in the history of Zen Buddhism, and there was no more unfair thing in history than this." Not only did he "rewrite the entire history of Zen Buddhism from scratch", but he revised and compiled it into the "Collected Works of the Monks of the Shenhui" in 1930. Furthermore, Hu personally believes that "this great monk Shenhui is really the true ancestor of Zen Buddhism and the original author of the "Altar Sutra".
However, as a confidant of the Shenhui master of different generations, until Hu Shi's death in 1962, he probably did not know that there was a statue of the Shenhui master in the "Brahma Scroll", and he could not see it in person. Because modern research on the picture basically began gradually after 1960, it was little known before, and it was only in 1982 that the original color version of the picture was published for the first time at the National Palace Museum in Taipei. It's a sigh to think about it now.
However, if you want to say that the beginning of research has to start with Emperor Qianlong. In the twenty-eighth year of Qianlong (1763), Qianlong was amazed when he saw this volume, thinking that "the images in the volume are good and solemn, and the color is painted with gold, and it is very wonderful", but he thinks that the Buddha statues and Bodhisattvas are arranged in disorder, and he ordered Zhang Jiaguo to examine the order, and in the thirty-second year of Qianlong (1767), the court painter Ding Guanpeng copied the second paragraph of the original work into the volume of "The Source of the Law Realm", and the fourth paragraph of the original work was copied as the volume of "The Barbarian King Rite Buddha".
Qing Dynasty Dawn "Imitation Ding Guanpeng Law Boundary Source Map" part of the Liaoning Provincial Museum collection
Qing Dynasty Dawn "Imitation Ding Guanpeng Law Boundary Source Map" part of the Liaoning Provincial Museum collection
In the 60s of the 20th century, when Mr. Li Lincan of the National Palace Museum in Taipei began to study, he always wanted to find the "Dharma Realm Source Map" according to the records of the Qing Palace, because Zhang Jiaguo studied Buddhism profoundly, and the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas examined were in order, and the names of the characters were written on the facsimile, which is of great reference value for the study of this volume. It was not until Mr. Weng Wange of United States told him that he learned that Ding Guanpeng's copy was kept in the Jilin Provincial Museum. In view of the hostile relations between the two sides of the strait at that time, in order to facilitate the study, Li Lincan and the National Palace Museum in Taipei tried every possible means to obtain the facsimile pictures. However, after understanding the original situation, I realized that although the Jilin Provincial Museum had preserved the original, there was no camera, and the reason why I couldn't cry or laugh can also be seen that the conditions were difficult back then.
In the fifty-seventh year of Qianlong (1792), Qianlong ordered the court painter Li Ming to copy a volume of "Ding Guanpeng Copy the Source of the Law Realm", the copy of this copy is now in the Liaoning Provincial Museum, these two volumes belong to the Qing Dynasty court antique works, and have a certain value in the study of "Sanskrit Statue Volume" and art history.
Dali is based on the southwest for more than 300 years, the letter history data is limited and very scattered, after the Ming Hongwu fifteenth year Mu Ying broke the Longwei Pass (now Yunnan Xiaguan), sent his righteous brother Li Hao to take over Dali, as a scholar he collected most of the ancient books of Nanzhao and Dali. According to Li Hao's nineteenth grandson, Li Chun, until the Cultural Revolution, his family's collection also included two wooden boxes of "History of Mengshi" recorded by Nanzhao, Qing Pingguan of Dali and Shuang Tuo, three boxes of "History of Duan", and more than ten boxes of miscellaneous records of "Accounts of Mengduan". It's a pity that these precious books were all destroyed during the Cultural Revolution, which is really embarrassing. It also makes a lot of information even more confusing.
Judging from the records, Zhang Shengwen once entered the Song Dynasty with the envoy during the Jiatai period of the Southern Song Dynasty, and the mission was ordered to purchase a large number of Buddhism, literature and history, medicine, music books, as well as gold and stone calligraphy and painting, which shows that Zhang Shengwen had the conditions to travel to the Central Plains and study, which is also the reason why the "Sanskrit Picture Scroll" is related to the style of Song painting.
The painting date of the "Sanskrit Scroll" is equivalent to the middle of the Southern Song Dynasty, and it is rare that this masterpiece has been handed down for more than 800 years. The diversity of styles and appearances fully shows the richness of Dali culture, although the study of the map has been a Jiazi, there are still many unsolved mysteries, and we look forward to more discoveries in the future. The painting is really the most important cultural relics in the study of the history, religion, culture, art, customs and so on of Nanzhao and Dali.