Early Buddhist Attitudes toward the Art of Painting

• Published in: The Art bulletin (New York, N.Y.) N.Y.), 1950-06, Vol.32 (2), p.147-151
• Main Author: Soper, Alexander Coburn
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Abstract art; Art dealing; Buddhism; Colors; Indian art; Indian literature; Nuns; Paints; Pigments; Statues
• ISSN: 0004-3079; 1559-6478
• DOI: 10.1080/00043079.1950.11407917

To the best of my knowledge, no attempt has been made to assemble and render into any European language the passages dealing with painting that may be found scattered through the Chinese translations of early Buddhist literature. Students of Indian art have turned to Pāli, Sanskrit, or Tibetan texts with profit, but their contributions have necessarily been limited. The Pāli books, bound to the Hīnayāna, in general show a less lively interest in the possibilities of the representational arts than is proper to the Northern School. Sanskrit remains are late, or non-Buddhist; the Tibetan literature is still doubly inaccessible behind physical and language barriers. In contrast, the Chinese translations cover the whole of Buddhist writings with unique completeness. At the same time they offer the most readily available collection of texts from the area and the period when sculpture and painting were first being granted high importance as a religious instrument: i.e. North India in the first two or three centuries of the Christian era. Their chief handicap is a staggering vastness; the total wordage in the 53 closely printed volumes of the modern Japanese Tripitaka must indeed approach "the sands of the Ganges" in number, and is immeasurably beyond the capacity of any individual to master. The literature has been studied, codified, epitomized, and in modern times sifted out into dictionaries by the Japanese; never, of course, by anyone whose interests have been more than remotely comparable to an art historian's, and never with any hope of completeness. So in offering this florilegium of quotations, I must confess first that it represents a probably tiny, but certainly indeterminate fraction of an unexplored whole; and then that almost all the items have been called to my attention by the writings of those best-informed in the field, the Japanese.