燃燈祈福胡伎樂——西安碑林藏盛唐佛教“燃燈石臺贊”藝術新知=Lighting the Lantern and Performing Foreign Dance and Music to Pray for Good Fortune——A New Artistic Learning on the Buddhist “Eulogy on the Stone Lantern”Inscription of the High Tang Period Collected in the Beilin Museum, Xi’an
To donate stone lanterns to the Buddhist and Taoist monasteries and temples was a very popular fashion in the High Tang period, but very few physical cases of the stone lanterns of that time survived to the present. In the 1950 s, the Beilin Museum in Xi’ an acquired a stone lantern pillar carved in the twenty-ninth year of Kaiyuan Era(741) of the Tang Dynasty, which bears the inscription of "Randeng shitai zan(Eulogy on the stone lantern)" and the names and official titles of the donors of this stone lantern to pray for good fortune. The 66 donors were from the neijiaofang( Palace Music School),yunshaofu( Bureau of Natural Harmony), Mansion of Prince of Ning, Zhangli Gate, jingzongjian(supervisor-general of the Court of the Imperial Stud) and other institutions, including Su Sixu, who was the director of the Bureau of Natural Harmony, and He Huaizhi and Ji Haihai, who were two of the famous pipa-lute musicians at that time. On the stone pillar, the scene of dance and music performance played by the people in foreign costumes and facial features and figures of exotic animals are also carved, the form and style of which would be from the Byzantine art.
