Medieval Buddhist of the Day

[Twitter, 3/13/23] Medieval Buddhists of the Day: The Zhu family of Qingyun county, Shandong, who donated a sculpture in 557, and who may be the new holders of the Rhetorical Flourish award for over-the-top claims. Last month I featured a group of donors, members of the Wang family. The Wang family’s inscription outright claims that they sacrificed their children’s inheritance and shortened their own lives in order to make a fitting donation. Hard to top, right? But the Zhu donors make a good showing as they talk up their sculpture:

然今朱氏邑人等，皆淨行，童年覬蕩，三塵練心，早日望除九難。遂以天保八年二月，敬造玉石像一區。廣倫盈尋，其崇兩仞，晝比望舒，夜光掩月。標標之美，九宇無以仿其奇；皎皎之潔，八方莫能比其麗. “So now the Zhu clan yi-society, all observers of ascetic practice, having indulged in a lustful youth, and cultivated their minds through the three modes of learning, wish now as soon as possible to eliminate the nine misfortunes of evil karma. Thus in the second month of the year 557, they respectfully commissioned [this] marble statue. In breadth it is a full measure [xun = 8 chi], its height is two ren [ren = 7 or 8 chi]; by day it is like the moon’s chariot, and by night its light blots out the moon. Its upright beauty is such that in the nine worlds none can imitate its rarity; its white purity is such that in the eight directions none can match its refinement.”

Claims like these definitely make it a shame that the sculpture itself hasn’t survived. (Apparently it was unearthed in the late Ming and now survives in several rubbings of the inscription alone.) I’m not an expert in the poetics of the time, but this one feels like its rhetorical ambitions kind of outpace its language: some of the parallel prose is less parallel than it is clearly trying to be, as in 晝比望舒，夜光掩月，and whoever wrote it used more allusive language than strictly necessary (using 崇 instead of 高 to refer to the sculpture’s height, for instance). It’s not unheard-of for a donor inscription to describe the monument it’s attached to, but usually the descriptions are more factual (“it is made of white marble, one chi eight cun tall”) – or if they praise the sculpture’s quality, the focus is more often on correct or “true” representation (“all the features of the sage’s visage are present” etc), or occasionally artistic skill (“we hired the most skilled artisan” etc). Still, my point is that the Zhu family took a normal practice (the “rhetoric of the gift”) to some pretty impressive extremes in this case, and so they’re our new champions in this.