Return of the Buddha: The Qingzhou Discoveries
Earlier today I was in Washington, D.C. and had a chance to visit the Smithsonian Institution. I decided to check out the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, where they had a main exhibit displaying a bunch of recently excavated Buddha statues.
Apparently, the story is that in 1996 in Qingzhou, which is south of Beijing, people were digging up an area to build a sports field for a school. They noticed some statue heads in the dirt they were digging up and talked to some historians, conveniently located in the Qingzhou Museum very very nearby. This whole little discovery eventually was brought to the attention of the Chinese government. In their amazingly infinite graces, the government gave the scientists an entire 10 days to carefully, slowly, and I’m sure with the utmost delicacy dig up everything they could, because construction would continue after those 10 days no matter what was left in the ground. (If you didn’t read that previous sentence with a heavy sarcastic intonation, read through it again with said intonation.) Anyway, they dug up around 400 objects, including many Buddha and Bhodisattva statues.
The amazing thing about these statues is that they are all from a very short 50-year period, during which the ruling dynasty changed from Northen Wei to Eastern Wei to Northen Qi—each with its own unique style of Buddha statue. You can very clearly see the gradual changes in style between the dynasties, and all of the statues are really impressive—the stylistic impressions the Northen Wei leave give way to very realistic and very human, almost kind, feeling the Northen Qi style has. I loved it.
On the other side of the floor, there was an exhibit entitled Faith and Form which was a privately-held collection of Japanese religious calligraphy and paintings. The most impressive were those done by the newly-Buddhist or newly-Japanese people who wrote in Chinese. There were scrolls of the deepest blue which had apparently been dyed in Indigo with gold writing which looked absolutely astonishing. There was a gigantic scroll with 地獄 (”hell”—composed of “Earth” and “prison”) emphatically written beautifully… and I guess I could keep going on. I loved it.
Anyway, now I got that out of my system. It was certainly a very nice experience.