Buddhist Temples in China; Buddhist Sculpture in China; Chinese Sculpture in Song Dynasty; Antiquities in China; Sorensen, Henrik H.
摘要
The writer discusses the iconography of the Buddhist sculptures from the Song Dynasty at Mingshan Temple in Anyue，Sichuan，China. There are currently 13 numbered sculptural groups at the Mingshan Temple，with a total of 63 images. The writer gives a detailed description of the Buddhist stone sculptures and endeavors to account for their style and iconography and to show how they fit into the local sculptural tradition. He examines the well-preserved Song dynasty sculptural groups only. He finds that in terms of iconography，they appear to have been stimulated by a hybrid form of Buddhism common in 11th- and 12th-century China, which united imagery from a variety of Chinese Buddhist traditions. He also finds that the typological and iconographic similarities of the Mingshan works with the slightly later Song dynasty sculptures at Dazu reveal that there was a relatively consistent vocabulary in this region of Sichuan at that time. Thus, the iconography of the Mingshan sculptures can be said to represent the mainstream of late Northern Song Buddhist sculptures as found in central Sichuan. A glossary completes the article.
