Medieval Buddhist of the Day

[Twitter, 7/2/19] Medieval Buddhists of the Day: the patrons of a Northern Wei stele in the V&A Museum in London (A.9-1935), dedicated in 520. They say a whole bunch of things in their inscription but one of them is this: 遠【聘】石匠將昆山美石雕妙聖之真容 This is roughly “[We hired] a stonecarver from afar to use beautiful Kunshan stone to carve the true visage of the miraculous saint [i.e. the Buddha].” I’ve had to infer the second character here because it’s blurry, but I think the sense of it is right.

It struck me because the vast majority of medieval patrons totally elide the role of the artist/artisan in their inscriptions and claim to have “made” 造 the monument themselves, which is patently untrue. It’s quite unusual for a patron to mention the artist at all. Two other examples I can think of offhand are Lady Yuchi 尉遲夫人 in the Guyang Cave at Longmen, whose 495 dedication says she “asked workers to carve the stone” 請工鏤石 to make her son’s memorial, and a stele sponsored by Zhu Xiong 朱雄 in 440 in which he records both his own name and the name of the craftsman, Luo Ding of Haizhou: 朱雄造此像 匠海州人洛定造.

In the V&A stele, the donors also do a bit of bragging about their materials (“beautiful Kunshan stone”) though the actual piece is fairly ordinary limestone. “Kunshan stone” has a very specific meaning now (white foraminate limestone from Ma’anshan in Jiangsu) but I don’t know offhand whether this was also true in the sixth century. It clearly meant something special, though, and these folks wanted to make sure we knew it.

Here’s the stele on the V&A website, by the way.