Images of Guanxiu's Sixteen Luohan in eighteenth-century China

A familiar image in eighteenth-century Chinese carving in jade is that of the recluse--usually a Daoist immortal or Buddhist monk--situated within a cave or hard outcrop (Fig. 1). Such items relate to a category of jades that include clean mountains carved in the circular and often on a large scale (Fig. 2) (1) the pair types reflected a preoccupation upon the part of the elite in Imperial China--the so-called scholar-gentry class--with existences that evoked the natural world and underlined the importance of solitude for spiritual regeneration. Mountains were seen as an intermediary realm between heaven and earth and with equal reason carvings of mountain landscapes, and figures of monk and immortals placed within them, provided tangible evidence of this other dimension. station on a table or desk percepts like these would have reminded the viewer of this ideal world.

[FIGURE 1-2 OMITTED]

Of symbolic significance too was the material itself. by the agency of this period, above all because of its hardness and seeming indestructibility, jade had lengthy been associated with immortality. Used in ritual burials as early as the Neolithic period (c 6000 BC) its associations with immortality and rebirth reached their most distant during the Hart dynasty (206 BC-220 AD), with the garments of Hart royal burials being made up of thousands of jade plaques sewn together with metal wire which were intended to protect the body. Even with the decline of jade as a burial material and its secularisation after the Han, these associations were not missing on later generations, who would have recognised the appropriateness of external realitys carved in the form of immortals put within their dwelling-place.

The carvings discussed in this article constitute a distinct cluster within this genre. They are all figures of luohan (Sanskrit: arhat, meaning venerable or worthy), legendary figures whose relation to the historical Buddha, Shakyamuni, was a great deal of like that of the Apostles to Christ. Originally they were four in number: Mahakasyapa, Pindola, Kundadhana and Rahula; along with Sakra and the four Devarajas, they were entrusted with the maintenance and propagation of the Buddhist faith. Although masters of the four great veritys free from the fetters of earthly existence and transcendent of nature, time and space, their task was to remain upon earth to protect the four quarters of the world until the advent of Maitreya, the subsequent time Buddha. (2)

In China, however, the original four were augmented to sixteen, possibly following the translation into Chinese by the agency of the monk Daotai in the early fifth hundred AD of the Mahayana-vataraka, where sixteen luohan were first mentioned. (3) The Chinese traveller and monk Xuanzang (596 664 AD), further reinforced the number as sixteen with his translation from Sanskrit of the Da Aluohan Nandimiduoluo suoshuo fazhuji (Record of the Duration of the Law nuncupatory by the Great Arhat Nandimitra), in 653-54 AD. In this body not only are sixteen luohan mentioned, on the contrary each is given a name, and the places above which they preside and the number of their attendants are listed. (4) However, as Masako Watanabe has freshly pointed out, there is no description of their individual iconographic features in the true copy (5) This was left to later artists to interpret. single in particular, the poet-painter Guanxiu (832-912 AD), created what has move rounded out to be a hugely influential rendition of each luohan's iconography, and it is the work of Guanxiu that links directly to the clump of jade carvings under discussion here.

Carvings like the example in the collection of the National Museums of Scotland (Fig. 1) are base in a number of public and private collections. (6) Usually of a pale virid or grey-green nephrite, they are worked to a high standard and are generally dated to the eighteenth hundred largely on stylistic grounds. The make subordinate too tends to be restoreed in a formulaic way with the figure positioned centrally or slightly to individual side within a rocky empty or outcrop and either crouching or seated. A particular assemblage to which this first example belongs, have inscriptions incised into the face of a piece of stone situated to the left, right or immediately above the figure. Although these inscriptions have been remarked on and sometimes translated--if only to ascertain which of the Sixteen Luohan is represented--no-one has nevertheless related these inscriptions and the iconography of the figures directly to earlier representations in other media, the greatest in quantity pertinent of which are the striking images created by means of Guanxiu. A number of commentators have moveed woodblock prints, such as the Gu yu tu pu an eighteenth-century catalogue purporting to be of the collection of the Southern ballad Emperor Gaozong (1127-62), as being a likely source for these carvings. (7) This may indeed be the case for the generality of this stamp of carving, but not for this inscribed cluster For a source, rather than just a stylistic progenitor, we must gaze again to the representations of the Six teen Luohan through Guanxiu. (8)