Medieval Buddhist of the Day

Over the past few years I’ve been in conversation with a number of artists and graphic novelists about vessels and objects from ancient East Asia that look like animals. For various reasons it’s come to the point that I would like to have the links I’ve collected all in one place, so here we go. The conversation started between me and Wendy Xu, creator of “Tidesong,” “The Infinity Particle” and other delightful books, over this adorable Neolithic hog pot from the Nanjing Museum:

So then we went looking for some other friends. Here is a non-exhaustive list of what I found, from across East Asia, but heavily weighted toward China, which is my area of expertise. I will add to this if I find more.

From China:
Yangshao (Neolithic) ceramic eagle ding:
“Proto-porcelain” animal vessels from the Warring States period, Suzhou museum: objects 2, 3, 4 in the top row (but check out object 1 in the second row too). These date c. 475-206 BCE.
A related piece of similar date from the National Palace Museum (Taipei) collection.
Shang dynasty (13th-12th c BCE) Owl-shaped bronze zun from Minneapolis Inst. of Art, and the same object from another angle.
Late Shang water buffalo vessel.
Shang animal guang (also pronounced gong): we’re not sure what the animal is but that never stopped the Shang bronzecasters apparently.
Han dynasty (206 BCE-221 CE) painted bronze oil lamp in the shape of a goose with a fish in its mouth. Another view is here. Note that the cylindrical lamp part has a movable shutter to close or open the lamp, which is cool, and the smoke of the lamp goes up the duck’s neck, which is also cool.
Han dynasty oil lamp in the shape of a ram. There are a bunch from this period that work this way, with the flip-top, but this is the fanciest b/c GILDED.

Western and Eastern Jin dynasty celadons (226-420 CE), Yue and Yaozhou ware especially, include lots of beasties:
Vessel in the shape of a mythical beast
Lion-shaped celadon vessel
Water dropper in the form of a toad from the British Museum, and a better quality image of the same object.
Chicken-headed ewers were quite common

There are some bronzes which are made up of multiple animals and I always think of them talking (or arguing) with each other.
Two ram zun, relative of the pushmi-pullyu:
Four ram zun, National Museum of China (I often imagine these four as bros)
Owl and tiger guang (Harvard Art Museums):

From Japan:

Haniwa, which are basically all from the Kofun period (3rd-6th c CE):
Horse (TNM)
Boar (TNM)
Ox (Kyoto Museum)
Dog (Nara National Museum)
TNM exhibition on animal haniwa with nice downloadable PDF:
Wikimedia Commons page on animal haniwa:

Not haniwa:
Late Jōmon (2470-1250 BCE) pig-shaped vessel from Aomori Prefecture (Hirosaki City Museum)
Late Jōmon turtle-shaped vessel from Chitose

From Korea:

Silla duck vessel, Nat’l Museum of Korea.
Another duck vessel, also Silla, with a mohawk.
Tiger pot (chamber pot?) from Buyeo. There is also a detail of its face.