The Chêng-Kuang Style, namely the style of Buddhist sculpture in the second half of the Northern Wei Dynasty centering around the Chêng-Kuang era (A. D. 520–524), is considered to have been in wide use in the whole land of Northern Wei State, but the styles of the following Eastern and Western Wei periods contain important elements which cannot be explained simply as stylized derivations of the Northern Wei style. The Eastern Wei State, especially, had the Hopei district, where the Chêng-kuang style had been firmly established, as its domain, and existing examples of Eastern Wei sculpture are far more numerous than those of Western Wei. The reason among others why Eastern Wei sculpture is important is the fact that only after studying the versatile, many-sided Eastern Wei style can we perfectly understand the uniform, fixed Northern Wei style of the sixth century. Such a versatile, many-sided character is of course in common in all transitional styles of art, but that of the Eastern Wei sculpture is especially interesting for the intricate combinations of elements of its period and its locality. The common traditional factor controlling these many-sided aspects is the powerful magnitude created by a strict symmetry, while a tendency for a new style is noticed in the gentle rounded representation of bodily parts. The former is the characteristic of the Northern Wei Chêng-kuang Style, and the latter characterizes the Northern Ch‘i Style. In order to suppress the effect of magnitude and emphasize a wellrounded rendition, the representation inevitably becomes simplified and gives birth to short, fat figures. It appears that Eastern Wei sculptors tried to neutralize these two contradictory factors within a very short period of time. The result is the recurrent inconsistenty in representation, in which the faces and bodies are partly well-rounded and three-dimensional while the figures as entireties show a flat, rigid effect. This is the characteristic of Eastern Wei sculpture. The combination of the strong magnitude of Northern Wei Style and the modest rounded representation of the Northern Ch‘i Style is found frequently in the Honan district, suggesting that the development from the Northern Wei to the Eastern Wei Style began in this district. Perhaps this fact will serve as one of the clues to interpret the interrelation between the contrasting styles of Buddhist sculpture in the Southern and Northern Dynasties. The above-mentioned contrasting characters of the Northern and Eastern Styles were evidently strongly at work in the Japanese Tori Style of the Asuka Period. It should be noted, however, that in accepting the Chinese inspiration the Tori School sculptors unified the many-sided aspects into a single consistent style, that is, they traced back to the fountainhead of the Northern Wei Style which had given birth to the Eastern Wei Style, and established their art based upon the austere symbolism characterizing Northern Wei sculpture.
