Lu Xinzhong is known as one of a group of professional painters of Buddhist subjects who was active in the port city of Ningbo (also called Qingyuanfu) in Zhejiang Province the late Song through early Yuan dynasties. Extant paintings attributed to Lu Xinzhong include sets of the Ten Kings of Hell, Sixteen Arhats, and a Nirvāṇa painting. However, among these works there is considerable difference in the brushwork, so it is difficult to attribute these materials to a single master. In light of this state of the field, my aim in this papers is to reconsider Lu's work, through an examination of one of the few recognized masterpieces to come from his studio, the Nirvāṇa painting in the collection of the Nara National Museum (hereafter referred to as the NNM Nirvāṇa painting), and through a comparison of this work with other Nirvāṇa paintings of the Song-Yuan through Ming-Qing periods. In the NNM Nirvāṇa painting, we do not find the extreme expressions of grief. The disciples who have climbed up onto Śākyamuni's bier are depicted in a variety of poses and expressions. In this painting, nirvāna clearly has associations other than sadness and mourning. Such clues as the expressions of the disciples, and the representation of the leaves of the sala tree in seven layers (an auspicious pattern normally found in paradise paintings), suggest that the intent of this painting is to pose a question to its viewers: “Is the meaning of Śākyamuni's nirvāṇa death? or life?” There is evidence that this question was one shared by the artist and his clients in Song-Yuan China. In that this Nirvāṇa painting reflects contemporary values and views about death and life, rather than being a faithful illustration of a Buddhist text, it departs from earlier standards of both iconography and meaning. One of the distinctive features of this painting is its relationship to an important phenomenon in Song and later Chinese Buddhism, that of Paradise Associations (Ch. jingtu jieshe 浄土結社). Such associations thrived at Yangingsi Temple, a large Buddhist temple in Ningbo that was undoubtedly one of the major clients for painters such as Lu Xinzhong. Yangingsi was one of the major Tiantai sect temples in China in the late Song period. From the early 11th through the early 13th century, there were some 10,000 persons, tonsured and lay, in Yanqingsi Paradise Associations. The Associations were organized in 210 groups of 48 persons (based on Amitābha's 48 vows), each group headed by an influential member of the community. A plenary meeting of all the Paradise Associations was held annually at Yanqingsi on the 15th day of the 2nd month, the day considered the anniversary of Śākyamuni's nirvāṇa. The 210 leading members would no doubt have taken part in these annual meetings, and they are the most likely group of clients for the NNM Nirvāna painting. Although it is not possible to point to specific and concrete evidence of a link between the NNM Nirvāna painting and the Yanqingsi paradise associations, the religious and social context of Yanqingsi in the Song-Yuan period, and the environment created there for the consumption of Buddhist paintings, cannot be ignored. In Ming dynasty nirvāṇa paintings--for example, that by Wu Bin in the collection of Sōfukuji, Nagasaki, or a work by an unknown painter at Shuntokuji, also in Nagasaki--we continue to see double layers of signification. But what had been a double reference to nirvāṇa and Amitābha's Western Paradise in the Lu Xinzhong painting has been transformed into double imagery of nirvāṇa and immortality, and the dominant imagery is celebratory. For the ordinary Chinese, the logic of rebirth in paradise was, like popular Taoist notions of immortality, one of the most easily comprehended and most welcome aspects of Buddhist doctrine, as both offered comforting visions of death. From the point in the Song dynasty when the very concept of nirvāṇa--portrayed in traditional texts as an occasion for mourning--became as
