The Mongol in ascendancy in the 13th century, and its possible domination of Tibet was averted by payment of tribute. When this practice ceased, large parts of the country were sacked. In 1244, the Tibetan hierarch, Sakya Pandita, arrived at the Mongol court in Liangzhou, Gansu bearing an olive branch. He managed to secure Tibet’s sovereignty and more importantly, laid the foundations for Mongol patronage of its religion and culture. The passage of Tibetan artisans to the Mongol domain was already in place when the Yuan court (1279-1368) was established at Dadu, present-day Beijing. Formal cultural contacts intensified thereafter, exercising a profound impact on the practice of both Chinese and Tibetan Buddhist painting.
From the 14th century onwards, a mingling of the two traditions gave way to a mutually enriching dialogue as the naturalistic, Chinese landscape convention interacted with vivid Tibetan imagery of intense colour and drama and vice versa. How a gradual synthesis of the finest from both emerged in a hybrid art that might be called ‘Sino-Tibetan’ or ‘Tibeto-Chinese’ is the subject of Tibet/China Confluences, an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), Boston. One of the world’s pre-eminent repositories of Chinese painting with works dating from the Song (960-1279), the MFA, Boston also has an exceptional collection of Tibetan art. Twenty paintings drawn from these holdings trace the confluence of Chinese and Tibetan styles, demonstrating how they continuously sustained one another from the 14th to the 19th centuries. This was a time of remarkable cultural achievements with important repercussions extending beyond the Buddhist painting of both countries. Printing had been invented in Tang China (618-906) and a selection of rare books from the MFA and Harvard College Library illustrate how the confluence of Tibet and China also came together in the printed book.
Buddhist painting had attained an exalted place in Song China. One of its cardinal features was the use of the image as a mode of representation, such as portraiture, to instill exemplary spiritual values. Native to India, the arhat or luohan in Chinese, was a term for the Buddha’s immediate disciples who were enlightened beings and ‘protectors of the Buddhist law’. Rarely depicted on the subcontinent, this cast of supporting figures was identified in Song monasteries as representations of virtuous conduct, and became an established part of Chinese Buddhist iconography. As elders of great spiritual knowledge, they were notable role models both in painting as well as sculpture, growing from the original four to 10, 16 and 18, and escalating to five hundred.
To establish the arhat convention as it was in 12th-century China, Tibet/China Confluences opens with the earliest arhat painting on display and one of the greatest such paintings in existence. Of Southern Song (1127-1279) provenance, Arhats feeding a Hungry Spirit by Lin Tinggui dated 1178, is an outstanding piece of work on many levels. More than 800 years old, it is one of the surviving works from an original set of 100 paintings depicting some 500 arhats. Signed and dated works of this genre are extremely rare, since almost nothing is known about the artists, or monks, who executed them, the majority of whom remain anonymous. In ink and colour on silk, the work is critical to understanding the then manner of the Chinese landscape style, its spatial depth, brushwork technique as well as colour application. An asymmetrical composition, its distinguishing feature is a framing device of the gnarled pine tree, a symbol of longevity, which later formed the basis for arhat paintings in Tibet. Sheltering a placement of three arhats in simple robes, the tree was designed to shift the focus on the central arhat and his good deed. Seated in three-quarter posture on a boulder, he is holding an alms bowl, flanked by two hungry spirits. Completing the spare composition are rock boulders and misty floating clouds in the background.
The Song arhat convention was subsequently modified. Mongol patronage of Tibet introduced new aesthetic ideals with far-reaching consequences. A new element entered the equation when neighbouring Nepal was approached by the Sakya order – to replace declining Indian influence – for artistic inspiration. Increasingly,Tibet began to play a major role as a conduit for exchanges between Nepal and China. Eighty Nepalese Newari artisans commissioned to work in the Sakya monastery in 1261, for instance, were transferred two years later, to service the court of Kublai Khan (r.1260-1294). Amongst them was the artist Anige (1244-1306), who was instrumental for introducing the Nepalese style to China. He became chief court painter, to whom an entire school of Yuan painting as well as sculpture and textiles, was ascribed. Under Mongol power, Yuan arhat conventions began incorporating elements from Chinese material culture such as costume and furniture. They feature among naturalistic motifs in two 14th-century compositions employing the asymmetrical tree-lined device where gold was used in addition to ink and colour. Surrounded by flowering shrubs, the focus of Arhat holding a Fly Whisk is his wise and wizened face, contrasting withhis Chinese garment of luxurious silks. The status of the unusually youthful, fresh-faced Arhat seated on a Lacquer Chair is enhanced by the piece of Chinese furniture giving him added authority.
In the interim, Chinese styles of representation reached Tibet. Around 1306, artisans trained by Anige in Yuan China returned home to work on murals of the Shalu monastery. By the 15th century, a style derivative of the Chinese arhat convention surfaced in eastern Tibet, which was nearer China. Arhat groupings of 18 were popular, two more than the 16 of Chinese origin. The Tibetan arhat assumed a stature akin to that in China, not found in India itself, where it was viewed as an enlightened disciple able to spread the word. Strong parallels with Yuan arhat painting might be found in the Arhat Cudapanthaka, circa 1500, from Eastern Tibet, depicted in distemperand gold on cotton, pata. An idealised portrait, the tree-framing device, the subject’s physiognomy, his enlarged throne-seat and elaborate silk costume are all Chinese elements. Yuan silks and costume had reached the country and began to be depicted as major pictorial components. However apurely Tibetan aesthetic permeates the shallow space. Its composition of bold colour and much animation, is chaotically arranged. Two young attendants, amonkey, a bodhisattva on a cloud, cavorting butterflies and parrots suggest a paradise far removed from the Chinese earth.
Spiritual lineages were intrinsic to the Tibetan Buddhist painting tradition. The Mahasiddhas, ‘great masters and teachers’ of Tibetan Esoteric Buddhism originated, like the arhat, in India. A grouping of 84, they were men of great spiritual accomplishment, endowed with supernatural powers. Although somewhat unorthodox, even eccentric, they were considered exemplary, being able to transmit the Buddhist doctrine from one generation toanother. The arhat convention was thus adapted to portray The Mahasiddhas Saraha, Dombi Heruka, Naropa and Virupa, an 18th-century Eastern Tibetan work suggesting a possible ‘abbreviated’ lineage chain. The first earthly teacher ofthe Sakya order, the liquor-imbibing Virupa was an important mahasiddha usually surrounded by empty vessels. The four figures with their various attributes areseated on clouds, juxtaposed against a topographic setting of pastel colours. Tibet did not develop its own landscape tradition and a stylised Chinese ‘blue-green’ landscape with architectural elements has been incorporated hereto suggest the Tibetan celestial realm.
Meanwhile, China was governed by a new order. The Ming (1368-1644) rulers were avid patrons of Tibetan Buddhism and the third emperor, Yongle (r.1403-1424) provided the impetus for a new painting genre. After reinstating Beijing as hisdynastic capital, he embarked on major infrastructure projects, inviting Tibetan and Nepalese artists to decorate the Forbidden City. Under Yongle’s aegis, Chinese engagement with Tibetan religious art flourished in a fusion of images from both cultures, known as the Sino-Tibetan style. Wrathful Tibetan guardian deities for instance, were assimilated into Chinese Buddhist painting. Drawn from multiple traditions, they often defy definition, making attribution difficult. The Mahakala is an important ‘protector’ deity featuring regularly in Tibetan temples and monasteries. A symmetrical composition, Mahakalaand Members of his Family portrays its manifestation as a wrathful, black-skinned ‘Lord of Death’ with three eyes, wearing a necklace of decapitated heads. Trampling on a nude corpse, he is set against a red and brown ground, with four smaller, wrathful deities at the corners. Previously thought representative of the 16th-century Central Tibetan style, the painting is now believed to be of Ming provenance, painted in 15th-century Beijing, when a mélange of Chinese, Tibetan and Nepalese elements was making strong inroads in court art.
The Mahakala however was not entirely new to China. A leading and much revered deity in the Sakya order, it had been the personal tutelary deity for Kublai Khan. The classic Tibetan idiom might be witnessed inthe 19th-century Mahakala as Panjaratha with Related Deities whose decorative vocabulary and meticulous detail unite all disparate elements. The demonic energy of the central blue-skinned deity bearing a diadem of five skulls, is enhanced by two wrathful male attendants on his right and two female ones on his left. Framed by stylised flaming aureoles, they appear on adistinctly Nepalese patterned red on red ground of a great cemetery with flyingbirds of prey. Multiple deities seated on clouds at the top of the painting, are complemented by a register of deities below in typical Tibetan fashion.
Hybrid influences in Ming religious painting reached a peak when the most important Tibetan patron deity, Avalokiteshvara, surfaced inSino-Tibetan style. The embodiment of compassion as the ‘all-seeing one’, it was also known as Lokeshvara, ‘lord of the universe’ at home. Adopted as Guanyin in China, it assumed a more feminine posture from the Song onwards, when its gender became irrelevant. The Thousand-armed Avalokiteshvara is an important 16th-century Ming work borrowing heavily from Tibetan ideals, but rendered with Chinese technique on silk. The thousand arms reflect its compassion, a miniature Amitabha Buddha on its crown and a lotus flower in its left hand indicate it is the Guanyin. Exuding supreme authority seated on anelevated, multi-tiered lotus pedestal, it is flanked by four red moons on either side, the background dissolving into the blue Tibetan heaven. Two indisputably Chinese warrior guardian figures at the pedestal’s base are clues to the painting’s provenance because they often appear in Ming paintings with no Tibetan influence.
When the late Ming emperors Jiajing (r.1522-1566) and Wanli (r.1573-1620) endorsed Tibetan Buddhism, more manifestations of the Guanyin in Sino-Tibetan painting followed. Although the 17th-century Eleven-faced, Eight-armed Avalokiteshvara is depicted on cotton, its strong Tibetan imagery was probably painted in China. A picture of meditation identified with Chinese Buddhism, the deity’s multiple arms and heads are attributes consonant with Tibetan tradition, reflected too in the paradise-like arrangement of space around it. However the flowers have a naturalism derived only from Chinese painting.
The Avalokiteshvara had assumed an extremely important stature already in Tang China. It was worshipped as a singular deity, superseding the Sakyamuni Buddha in popularity. This was a major impetus stimulating the invention of block printing in the Tang, so that the Guanyin might emerge a principal figure in handscroll narratives. By Song times, the print culture became a new aid to scholarship, and its superior technology allowed emperors to exercise full authority over the printed word. Standardised and imperially sanctioned books printed at imperial behest were thus central tothe Chinese printing tradition. Many of these were Buddhist in content, and as designated ‘foreign’ gifts, appeared in other languages.
During the Yuan, the dialogue between China and Tibet extended into printed books. Volumes of the Chinese Buddhist canon printed in 14th-century China for Tibet were influenced – as in painting – by Nepalese imagery in composition and style. The frontispiece of the Illustration and Text to the Mahaparinirvana Sutra (Jisha edition) circa 1301, printed by Chen Sheng and designed by Chen Ning, has the dense figural composition associated with the Nepali genre. Few imperially printed Tibetan books have survived and five rare volumes from the 15th to the 18th centuries on display were lent by the Rare Book Collections of the Harvard-Yenching Library. They include two rare books commissioned by the Ming Yongle emperor in 1410 as part of a monumental project where the entire Tibetan Buddhist canon of over 170 volumes appeared in massive luxury formats. It was the first time the canon was printed in this manner. A project of this scale was intended to gain merit and impress Tibetan rulers of Ming might since such technology did not exist in Tibet. The Qing (1644-1911) emperor adherents to Tibetan Buddhism also printed their own editions of the Tibetan canon. In 1680, the Kangxi emperor (r.1662-1722) made the Hall of Martial Valour, Wuyingdian, at the Forbidden City his official printing house for exclusive imperial publications. His grandson, the Qianlong emperor (r.1735-1795) printed 1,200 books in various disciplines including Manchu, Chinese, Mongolian and Tibetan, as publication reached its zenith after almost four centuries of encounters between Tibet and China.
Yvonne Tan
Until 23 May, Tibet/China Confluences is at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 465 Huntington Avenue, Boston, www.mfa.org
