The proverbial stele

[Twitter, 3/22/23] Medieval Buddhists of the Day: the donors of a stele dated 530 (N. Wei) in the 中国国家博物馆, usually called the Xue Fenggui 薛凤规 stele. There are approximately a zillion names on this stele, but I want to focus on the dedication and particularly its use of 成语. As anyone who’s learned 普通话 as a second language knows, you spend an amount of time learning 成语 that is sometimes all out of proportion to their actual use in the wild. For those who haven’t, 成语 are probably best thought of as proverbs or idiomatic set phrases. English has these too, like “All’s well that ends well” – and in fact we get many of them from Shakespeare. In China these phrases may have a much longer history, so it’s funny to run into one in an early text if you’ve only learned it in a modern-language course.

These donors talk about the nature of illusion in their dedication, saying: 故神螭愛德，尚留影于北天；葉公好龍，由降形以示真。”Thus the Buddha’s love of virtue was such that his [true] image still remains in the cave at Nagarahāra; but Lord She’s love of dragons was such that he let a semblance stand in for the reality.” [With thanks to Lin Chia-Wei for a discussion that clarified this – I didn’t get the reference to the cave at Nagarahāra at first. The Buddha is referred to as a kind of dragon, which allows for a poetic parallel, and the “northern sky” 北天 is maybe a shortening of 北天竺 “northern India” as the Chinese imagined it – Nagarahāra is near modern Jalalabad in Afghanistan.]

The first part here is a reference to the “cave of the Buddha’s shadow” 佛影窟 at Nagarahāra, where the Buddha left his shadow imprinted on the wall – a true image from life. Lord She’s love of dragons is still proverbial today, though the story dates back to Liu Xiang (77-6 BCE). He was said to love dragons so much that his walls were covered with paintings of them and his house full of carvings. One day a dragon, pleased by this, came to visit Lord She. When he put his head in at the window, Lord She panicked, turned pale, and hid under the bed. He loved the semblance of dragons, but the real thing was just too much for him.

The point seems to be that virtue can distinguish the true image (the Buddha’s shadow) from a hollow semblance (Lord She’s painted dragons), which has relevance for the question of Buddhist images and their status. The patrons must aim for the former and not the latter. The idea is not out of place in a dedication, which often contains some kind of apologia for imagemaking. But it was interesting to encounter poor old Lord She and his dragons being used in the year 530 very much as he is used today.