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

Apollo, Nov, 2003 by Nick Pearce

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 rocky outcrop (Fig. 1). Such items relate to a category of jades that include complete mountains carved in the round and often on a large scale (Fig. 2). (1) Both types reflected a preoccupation on the part of the elite in Imperial China--the so-called scholar-gentry class--with objects 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 so carvings of mountain landscapes, and figures of monks and immortals placed within them, provided tangible evidence of this other dimension. Set on a table or desk, objects like these would have reminded the viewer of this ideal world.

[FIGURE 1-2 OMITTED]

Of symbolic significance too was the material itself. By this period, above all because of its hardness and seeming indestructibility, jade had long 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 extreme during the Hart dynasty (206 BC-220 AD), with the shrouds of Hart royal burials being made up of thousands of jade plaques sewn together with metal wire which were intended to preserve the body. Even with the decline of jade as a burial material and its secularisation after the Han, these associations were not lost on later generations, who would have recognised the appropriateness of objects carved in the form of immortals set within their dwelling-place.

The carvings discussed in this article constitute a distinct group 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 much 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 defence and propagation of the Buddhist faith. Although masters of the four great truths, free from the fetters of earthly existence and transcendent of nature, time and space, their task was to remain on earth to protect the four quarters of the world until the advent of Maitreya, the future Buddha. (2)

In China, however, the original four were augmented to sixteen, possibly following the translation into Chinese by the monk Daotai in the early fifth century 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 Spoken by the Great Arhat Nandimitra), in 653-54 AD. In this text, not only are sixteen luohan mentioned, but each is given a name, and the places over which they preside and the number of their attendants are listed. (4) However, as Masako Watanabe has recently pointed out, there is no description of their individual iconographic features in the text. (5) This was left to later artists to interpret. One in particular, the poet-painter Guanxiu (832-912 AD), created what has turned out to be a hugely influential rendition of each luohan's iconography, and it is the work of Guanxiu that links directly to the group of jade carvings under discussion here.

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