Medieval Buddhist of the Day

[Twitter 7/10/19] Medieval Buddhists of the Day: the thirty or so original donors, not named separately, of an early Sui figure of the bodhisattva Guanyin, with base. The piece is in the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. (This image from Jin Shen’s 金申 1994 handbook of dated Buddhist images, no. 228.)

So this piece has two inscriptions, both on the base, left by two different groups of patrons. The 1st is dated to 570 in the Northern Zhou, by a group of 30 donors, and the 2nd to 581 in the Sui.

This is a common type of standing figure in the 2nd half of the 6th century: the figure and base are carved separately, and fitted together by a tang under the feet of the figure which fits into a hole in the center of the base. The figure’s weight keeps it in place. Naturally this made it easy for base and figure to become separated, and it seems like this may have happened here. The earlier inscription on the base says that the N. Zhou donors 敬造釋迦像一區 “reverently commissioned a figure of Sakyamuni;” and the Sui donors claim they 敬修釋迦像一區 “reverently restored a figure of Sakyamuni.” While it’s true that there is sometimes a mismatch between the iconography of a figure and the Buddhas or bodhisattvas invoked in the dedication, Sakyamuni to Guanyin seems a stretch. Even if this figure were bought off the peg, as it were, and inscribed later (which may explain some such mismatches), attaching the name of a Buddha to the figure of a bodhisattva strikes me as a category error. I think it’s more likely that this isn’t the original figure.

But back to our donors. A common rhetorical flourish in dedications like this one emphasizes the costliness of the gift, and/or the sacrifices made to afford it. Amy McNair has a great chapter on this in “Donors of Longmen.” Basically, donors will claim to have “exhausted the resources of the family” or “sacrificed the comforts of the body” to fund the work. Women “set aside their rouge and hairpin money” and monastics “give up the resources of robe and begging bowl.” We know few of the details about how gifts were actually funded, but the rhetoric of sacrifice appears frequently.

The original donors of our lost Sakyamuni, however, put it in a way I haven’t seen before: 諸邑子卅人等減割身世之爪, loosely, “the thirty members of our society set aside those things we had grasped possessively in this life.” The phrase that strikes me is 身世之爪. The last character literally means claws or nails, but it’s commonly used as a substitute for 抓, a related verb meaning to grasp at, claw at, or even search frantically for. Most of the senses of the word 抓 imply just the kind of desperate and possessive attachment to the material world that a good Buddhist is supposed to resist. Thus for these donors, the very things they gave up to afford their donation were also the things they shouldn’t have placed so much value on in the first place. 身世之爪. You could render it quite succinctly as “the graspings of this present incarnation.” How better to give them up than in the service of creating a Buddhist monument? Personally, I’m impressed.