Paintings and Temple Murals
Personal Experiences
1. Murals and Scrolls
The history of wall painting can be traced back to the Stone Age through sealed caverns underground. Dry conditions, remoteness, burial under sand or volcanic ash have conspired to save murals that in previous millennia emblazoned homes, tombs, palaces and temples across the globe.
Murals live on in the free-lance daubs of graffiti artists and large-scale commissions for private and public buildings. Yet murals suffer from lack of the mobility and negotiability enjoyed by other art forms. Their fate is largely bound to the building which houses them. Indeed it was the determination of Liáng Sichéng (1901-1972, son of radical reformer Liáng Qîchao) and his wife Lín Huiyin to write a scientific history of Chinese architecture that led recognition of the value of the temple murals.
From the Hàn dynasty, two thousand years before present, tombs of the wealthy were lavishly decorated with wall paintings showing scenes of the everyday, history and supernatural imaginings. Then Buddhism began to sponsor brilliantly coloured shrines for the departed which could still be viewed by the living. The most celebrated of these are the cave temples carved out of cliffs at Dunhuáng oasis near the Gobi desert, preserved by the dry air and seclusion from later centres of population, though now a burgeoning tourist mecca.
China’s tradition of painting on silk or paper scrolls is widely acclaimed. Less known are her murals. Until one thousand years ago murals held pride of place. Most famous in n this field was Wú Dàozî of the Táng dynasty who excelled at both landscape and the human figure. No originals of his are known to survive, but reputed copies have been influential. His was an heroic style of ‘iron wire’ lines, celebrated for capturing the violent movement of rushing waters and furious demons.
The legendary Wú Dàozî (Wú Dàoxuán) was known for bold, untrammelled brush strokes outlining vibrant figure, dragon and cascading water murals. He received the patronage of art-loving emperor Mínghuáng (Xuánzong, r. 713-755) and is said to have painted murals in over three hundred temples. Today not one single authentic Wú Dàozî is known to survive, though there are many purported copies and later imitators.
A number of stone engravings from temple murals are claimed to represent Wú Dàozî originals. Of these one of the most striking is the ferocious Flying God or Quyang Demon (Qûyáng Guî) from the Northern Mountain Range Temple (Bêiyuè Miào) in Qûyáng, Hébêi. The stone tablets from which rubbings were taken, one from late Míng and another from Qing, have been mounted in an outbuilding wall. Yet amazingly the painted walls with the image from which the engraving was copied still survive. These are the east and west walls of the great Virtuous Tranquility Hall （Déníng Diàn）at the north end of the temple’s vast enclosure. Each mural measures approximately thirty feet high by ninety feet broad.
In 2005, Marnix signed a contract, under his Chinese name Wei Manyi 韦满易, with curator Ms. Wang Limin 王丽敏 of China’s Wenwuju Office to publish the murals, for the first time, in a volume of high-definition colour photographs. This would require the erection of scaffolding：first to clean, then repair, and finally to light and photograph the massive walls. This gargantuan task was finally completed in 2022 with a magnificent state-of-the art publication, including panoramas and close-up images in a scientific survey and analysis of the murals.
2. Civil and Martial
In subsequent dynasties two opposed ‘schools’ of painting diverged – that of the literati as opposed to that of the craftsmen and muralists. Táng poet-painter represented the former, Wú Dàozî the latter. A related dichotomy, which could apply to these two trends was that between the civil and martial. By the end of the Míng dynasty, under the influence of critic Dông Qíchang, the victory of the civil, scholar painter’s ‘art for art’s sake’ was complete. Only ‘landscapes of the mind’, far removed from vulgar realities, could be taken as serious ‘art’. The era when ‘true artists’ could paint on scrolls as well as on walls seemed long past.
No longer fashionable the primacy of the human form, the anatomical heritage of Hellenic sculpture transmitted by Alexander’s Macedonian Greeks to the borders of India. From there it had been adapted by Kushan Buddhists and entered China. It reached a peak in the Táng dynasty under the cultured reign of emperor Mínghuáng, Xuángzong (r. 713-755). The Japanese enthusiastically imported all they could. They copied and tenaciously preserved much of what in China perished in civil wars and the great religious persecutions of Wûzong (841-846).
Largely unknown are the surviving Buddhist and Daoist temple murals in more inhabited and developing regions, endangered by neglect and misguided ‘restoration’ and innovation. Many of these were executed on a grand scale. Sold off by temples impoverished in the wake of ‘anti-superstition’ campaigns of the Republican era from the nineteen-twenties, some now grace the walls of Western museums. Others from recently excavated tombs are now on view in the great museums of China’s provincial capitals. Still others in temples at less accessible locations await the sight-seer.
In these murals of beings divine and mortal we find a world far from the bare landscapes of scholar painters. These artists or ‘craftsmen’ had little social standing and generally received no written notice or recognition. They may be compared to the anonymous artists who created the wonders of European cathedrals in the Middle Ages. They had a fine command of colour and design, but above all power and fluency of line on a grand scale, unmatched by academic painters.
3. Buddhism and Daoism
The majority of Chinese murals in museums of the U.S.A. and Canada originate from Buddhist and Daoist temples in southern Shanxi and date to the Mongol Yuán dynasty ca. 1300. The sale of Guângshèng Lower Temple murals was held in 1928. The Penn Museum of Philadelphia purchased its Lower Temple Tejaprabha and Bhaisajyaguru murals from its front hall, 32 feet long, dated 1475+; while Kansas City’s Nelson Atkins Museum acquired the 50ft Tejaprabha mural, New York’s Metropolitan Museum the Bhaisjyaguru from its main hall dated 1320+.
(Jing Anning 2002: The Water God’s Temple of the Guangsheng Monastery: Cosmic Function of Art, Ritual and Theater, Leiden, Brill. 29; 205-206) To transport them they murals were cut up into squares and boxed before being re-assembled at their destination, not without visible scars of their ordeal. A more drastic fate, like that of Abu Simnel in Egypt, comparable fate, befell the Yônglègong which was moved in entirety twenty kilometres back to avoid flooding from a planned dam on the Yellow River.
The great Buddhist Guângshèng temple of Hóngtóng district has been the subject of an in-depth study by Jing Anning. It remains structurally intact, with its ‘flying rainbow’ pagoda filled with mutli-coloured ceramic sculptures, and murals depicting detailed scenes of real life in thirteenth century Chinese society. Its formal, monumental panels feature crowded line-ups of Buddhas, bodhisattvas, Hindu deities and dignitaries.
Yônglègong, the major Quánzhen Daoist temple, was featured in Lennert Gesterkamp’s penetrating study of four Daoist temples. The last of these four Daoist temples is not in Shanxi but just across the border in southern Hébeî province. This is the Beîyuèmiào, which was also the great state shrine to the Northern Mountain Range, at Qûyáng near Bâodìng. From ancient times Chinese emperors worshipped the principal mountains of the five cardinal directions, including centre. These natural barriers symbolised imperial dominion extending out from the centre to the horizons.
Qûyáng is situated towards the southern end of the Taìháng range, dividing Shanxi from Hébeî and extending north to the Great Wall and Inner Mongolia. After Beîjing became China’s capital from the Yuán dynasty, the North Mountain Temple situated hundreds of miles to the south at Qûyáng became an anomaly. Finally, the Manchu Qing dysnaty down-graded this temple and made its official North Mountain shrine on Mt. Heng, near the Great Wall in Shanxi. In the past century it has attracted attention chiefly for its architecture and inscriptions.
The Beîyuèmiào then may best be classed as belonging to state religion, rather than to Daoism in the sectarian sense. Its colourful iconography is unmatched but clearly depicts the five directional mountain god-kings and weather deities. A ‘flying rock’ meteor was enshrined here as a sign from Heaven that this was the spot where imperial worship should be done. Emperors made petitions here for rain to fall in times of drought, or for rain to cease when it was excessive. Power to make or withhold rain was a divine function claimed by all religions, and generally manifested in the shape of a dragon.
Yet it is in the style of its mural paintings, traditionally credited to Wú Dàozî, that this Qûyáng temple differs most from the Yuán dynasty temples, Buddhist or Daoist. The temple’s great hall, as it stands now, with its magnificent curving ceramic roof and massive wooden pillared colonnade, is a peerless example of Yuán architecture. Yet the date of the temple roof may not be sufficient to date its interior walls. Gesterkamp concluded that its murals belong in style to an earlier period, perhaps the tenth century.
4. Buddhist Sutra Tableaux
As remarked above, Buddhism provided a major vehicle for the transmission of Graeco-Roman sculptural realism in life-sized depictions of the human form. Large-scale murals from Buddhist temples were reproduced in early engravings and the earliest printed books. Most famous is the title page of the Diamond Sûtra, showing the Buddha preaching to disciples and gods in the golden-tiled Jetavana garden. Another frontis-piece, preserved in Guângshèng temple’s Jin dynasty Tripitaka of 1148-1173, despite later date, shares many features of Dunhuáng’s illustration.
Great Goose Pagoda in Xi’an, then Cháng’an the Táng capital, was built in 652 by emperor Taìzong to house Buddhist scriptures carried back from India by monk Xuánzàng. It then had five stories. Empress Wû Zétian expanded it fifty years later to its present seven stories. A rubbing taken from one of its stone engraved lintels, depicts a tableau of the Buddha preaching to a packed congregation. This quadruple-haloed Buddha is pictured preaching, hand outstretched, full-face to viewer seated in the centre of a Táng-style open columnaded temple. The tiled roof with elaborate wooden bracket supports are shown in full architectural detail.
The lay-out is highly symmetrical. While the Buddha himself is highly formalised, members of his congregation show individualisation. This triple-haloed audience, slightly turned in towards him, is also seated in the direction of the viewer. Those in front seem to have left their haloes to avoid impinging on those seated behind.
Each sits cross-legged on a lotus seat, some with palms together in devotion, some presenting lotus buds, others with varying gestures and pleasant expressions. Some are, as if humorously, depicted peering or peeping from behind an obstructive column. All are bare-chested, and wear jewelry with ornate head-dresses in quasi-Indian style. On the sides double-haloed attendants stand reverently. A small boy, naked with single halo, bears a platter of fruits on his head.
In a blank space to the side of the carved figures, a discretely inserted inscription dated 1107, third month, twenty-third day, records an internment. Over five hundred years later, during the reign of Míng emperor Wànlì, a plethora of elegant graffiti are professionally engraved (1580, 1583, 1589), blatantly superimposed on the fore-mentioned inscription and members of the carved Buddhist assembly regardless.
Late Míng gentry clearly valued their own poetic and calligraphic immortality over the sanctity of Buddhist iconography, evincing scant respect, even disdain, for either the religion or its art. The Tejaprabha mural in the Toronto Museum of Asian Art bears historical marks at its base of similar desecration by graffiti, this time in black ink.
5. First Printed Painting
In the Dunhuáng Diamond Sûtra’s print we witness a radical change in iconography. In both we observe the Buddha seated at ease, at a forty-five degree angle to the reader, preaching with outstretched hand. The Jin Tripitaka, said to reproduce a mural from the Guângshèng temple, was printed over three hundred years later. Yet it bears many features in common with the Diamond Sûtra illustration of the year 800. This affinity could be explained if the originals of both were from temple murals painted in the eighth century, the apogée of Táng civilization.
Now we see a Buddha sporting moustachioes and goatee beard, with combine head and body halo. Two warriors bearing diamond clubs stand guard. The congregation is composed of Chinese monks, vividly portrayed.