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[Twitter, 7/15/19] Medieval Buddhist of the Day: Xie Baoming 解保明, chief patron of a Buddhist charitable society that dedicated a stele with an image of the Buddha Maitreya in 533, during the Northern Wei. The piece is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC. Here’s Xie Baoming on the bottom front of the stele,
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[Twitter 7/12/19] Medieval Buddhist of the Day: Yang Shuangjin 楊雙進 of Quyang County in Hebei. He dedicated a white marble Guanyin in 547, explaining: 晉州戍身患願得歸家造觀音像一區: “While guarding the frontiers of Jinzhou, I fell ill; in hopes of being [safely] returned to my family I commissioned an image of Guanyin.” It’s not unusual for a donor
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[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
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[Twitter 7/8/19] Medieval Buddhists of the Day: the eight female donors of an especially fine gilt-bronze Buddha group, dedicated in 593 during the Sui dynasty and now held in the collections of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (click here for photographs of all its separate parts). The donors are eight women of various surnames
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[Twitter, 7/5/19] Medieval Buddhist(s) of the Day: Three anonymous donors who left three consecutive dedications on the ceiling of the Guyang Cave at Longmen. There is also the possibility that maybe it’s just one donor, but in that case, the person definitely went to grad school: 為諸同學等 “For my many classmates and such” 為一切苦惚眾生 “For
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[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
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[Twitter 7/1/19] The Medieval Buddhists of the Day are the donors, mostly members of the Wu 吳 family, of a N. Wei stele dedicated in 531 and depicting Sakyamuni and Prabhutaratna in conversation, illustrating the apparition of the miraculous stupa from the Lotus Sutra. The donors, a mixed group of male and female patrons, take
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[Twitter, 6/17/19] Medieval Buddhist of the Day, getting ready to go on vacation edition: Du Shancai 杜善才, who dedicated one of the white marble statues from Quyang, Hebei, in the year 606 (Sui dynasty), in honor of his deceased parents. His parents must have been Buddhists too, because his name is Sudhana, the short form
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[Twitter, 6/13/19] The Medieval Buddhist of the Day is another aunt. We are on a roll with the aunts. This one is also a nun, like yesterday’s MBOTD. Her name is Dhyana-Master Jinggan 靜感禪師 and her ashes were interred in 646 in a cliff-face niche at the Lingquan Temple at Baoshan, near Anyang in northern
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[Twitter, 6/12/19] Medieval Buddhists of the Day: Fawen 法文 and Falong 法隆, a pair of nuns. In 509 they sponsored a very small niche containing an image of Maitreya, near the Guyang Cave at Longmen. Their dedication is pretty conventional, but the content of their vow caught me out with its poetry. It reads 願使過見者普沾法雨
Medieval Buddhist of the Day 