JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Artibus Asiae Publishers is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Artibus Asiae. Q\ uestions about the origin and identity of the Chinese deity named Xiwangmu have provoked Q a number of studies by various scholars such as Homer H. Dubs, Michael Loewe, Riccardo Fracasso, and Wu Hung.' All of the above discuss the various pre-Han and Han texts describing Xiwangmu and, with the exception of Fracasso and Dubs, include images of her produced by Han artists. Dubs discusses some 24 textual descriptions, focusing on her role as a folk deity; images of her in late Han art are referred to but not illustrated, as being supplemental to the texts on which he concentrates. Loewe sees her as linked to the Han cult of immortality, citing relevant texts from many periods, including those written well after the Han dynasty ended in A.D. 220. For illustrations he has chosen line drawings of images from late Han pictorial stones from Shandong and a mirror back. Dubs, writing in 1942, and Loewe, writing in 1978, did not have the advantage of the many other images of Xiwangmu discovered by Chinese archaeologists in recent excavations.Wu Hung, approaching Xiwangmu as an art historian, has relied on images of her as his primary sources, with the texts as supplemental. He reads her images in several ways, depending on the context in which they appear; she was a deity who ruled on Mount Kunlun, was linked to the cult of immortality, inspired devotion, and was prayed to for rescue in time of trouble. Her soteriological role was emphasized by Dubs who saw her only in that role. This is the role implicit in those images of Xiwangmu showing her en face. Wu Hung remarks further on her role in Sichuan as a granter of good fortune and on another role, along with her consort Dongwanggong, presented in Shandong, where the two deities take on a cosmic function as emblems ofyin and yang respectively. Wu Hung's argument is the most complete art historically. Riccardo Fracasso deals only with texts and includes several not used by Dubs or Loewe. Images of Xiwangmu in art are not his concern.The Xiwangmu we see in Han art does not fit all the descriptions of her in the texts. Even so, it is in early texts like the Shan Hai Jing that beliefs in her existence, who she was, and where she dwelt, were stated. We assume that Han artists developed their images based on the same body of folk beliefs that inspired the writers of the various texts. Of the diverse Han texts dealing with Xiwangmu, the Huainanzi, the Han Shu, and the Yi Lin contributed to the concept of Xiwangmu as she appears in Han art, that is as a deity with certain attributes and certain powers. We posit a body of belief about a ...
No abstract
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Artibus Asiae Publishers is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Artibus Asiae.The study of iconography and iconographic programs is a staple of art history in the West.Pre-Buddhist iconography in China is a field in need of exploration. The artists who decorated tombs and stone-constructed offering shrines during the Han dynasty (206 B. C.-A.D. 220), like their contemporaries in the Roman world, used images to convey messages pertinent to the function and use of the structures involved. Three major themes are presented in the Eastern Han offering shrines in Shandong: scenes referring to the Three Bonds of filial piety, the chief social and political values in Han society; the good omens that appeared as signs of Heaven's response to virtuous conduct; and the post mortem journey of the hun soul of the deceased and its safe arrival in its new celestial home.The walls of the famous Wu family shrines of Shandong were designed to display pictures referring to these themes. These themes, in turn, determined the placement of the motifs in that decorative program, a placement restored to order by Wilma Fairbank, whose seminal study of the offering shrines of the Wu family was published over 40 years ago.' Fairbank's reconstruction of the arrangement of the stone panels that make up the walls of the shrines was based on her perception of the inherent logic of their iconography, and was assisted by the layout of the still intact shrine of Wu Liang. In addition, other scholars have presented their views of single scenes and motifs.2 Several recent articles have placed the shrines within their cultural contexts.3 Finally, a recent revision of the Fairbank reconstruction by Jiang Yingju and Wu Wenqi has apparently SWilma Fairbank, "The offering shrines of Wu Liang Tz'u," Harvard journal of Asiatic Studies 6 (194I): pp. I-36. I am grateful to Mrs. Fairbank for her many helpful suggestions and criticisms of the first draft of this article. Other helpful criticism was furnished by Professor Robert A. Rorex, University of Iowa. For a full discussion of the Wu shrines and the stories told by the images in them see E. Chavannes, Mission arche'ologique dans la Chine septentrionale (Paris, 1913); Jean M. James, An Iconographic Study of Two Late Han Funerary Monuments: the Offering Shrines of the Wu Family and the Multichamber Tomb at Holingol, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Iowa, 1983. 2 Patricia Berger, "The 'Battle of the Bridge' at Wu Liang Tz'u: a problem in method," Early China 2 (I976): pp. 3-7; P. Berger, "Purity and pollution in Han art," Archives ofAsian Art 36 (I983); pp. 40-58; A. G. Bulling, "Three popular motives in the art of the Eastern Han period," A...
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