Donors of Longmen: Faith, Politics, And Patronage in Medieval Chinese Buddhist Sculpture
Amy McNair
University of Hawaii Press
Donors of Longmen  is the first work in a Western language to   recreate the history of the Longmen Grottoes, one of China's great stone   sculpture treasure houses. Longmen, a UNESCO World Heritage site located   near the old capital of Luoyang in modern Henan Province, consists of   thousands of ancient cave chapels and shrines containing Buddhist icons of   all sizes that were carved into the towering limestone cliffs from the   fifth to the eighth century. Beyond its superb sculpture, Longmen also   preserves thousands of engraved dedicatory inscriptions by its donors, who   included emperors and empresses, aristocrats, court eunuchs, artisans,   monks, nuns, lay societies, female palace officials, male civil and   military officials, and ordinary lay believers.<P>Based on wide reading of   both Asian and Western-language scholarship and careful analysis of the   architecture, epigraphy, and iconography of the site, Amy McNair provides a   rich and detailed examination of the dynamics of faith, politics, and money   at Longmen, beginning with the inception of the site at Guyang Grotto in   493 and concluding with the last major dated project, the forty-eight   Amitabhas added to the Great Vairocana Image Shrine in 730. Believers   sponsored statues and cave shrines as public acts of giving  (dâna)    and merit  (karma)  to generate social credit in the political realm   and karmic merit in the spiritual. Although donors' choices of icons reveal   the changes in Buddhist religious concerns over the 250-year life of the   site, the discussions of expenditure in the dedicatory inscriptions reveal   not only how much was spent, but also the rhetoric appropriate to the   donor's station in life, gender, and the intended audience. McNair argues   that donors made conscious decisions regarding the style of their   sculptures--a lively interplay between native Chinese imagery and icons and   styles of art from the Buddhist holy land of India--so as to imbue the   images with meanings that were immediately comprehensible to their   contemporaries.<P>Through the her sensitive and well-informed exploration   of Longmen's huge repository of remarkable early sculpture, McNair gives   voice to a wide array of medieval believers, many of them traditionally   excluded from history. Hers will be the definitive work on Longmen for   years to come.