Bodies of Buddhas and princes at the Xiangtangshan caves: Image, text, and stupa in Buddhist art of the Northern Qi dynasty, 550-577

The Buddhist cave temples of Xiangtangshan, in the province of Hebei, northern China, were created with the official sponsorship of the Northern Qi court. They are ambitious in scale and design, and in the variety and quality of the stone carvings. The sculptural, inscriptive, and architectural material are of great artistic and historical value and exhibit the innovative character of Northern Qi art. The modes of representation of the human figure apparent in the Northern Qi period are markedly different from those of the early part of the sixth century under the Northern Wei. The engraving of Buddhist sutras in stone, which becomes widespread in the Northern Qi period, is previously unknown. The stupa with dome roof, rarely seen in the metropolitan area of China before the Northern Qi, becomes the prevalent type. This study examines these three separate aspects of the art of Xiangtangshan--the sculpted images, the engraved Buddhist scriptures, and the architectural form of the stupa--in a variety of contexts. Important elements of Buddhist observance and practice can be seen to correspond to these separate artistic forms. Considered as a whole, they bring together a number of interesting concepts and issues. Among these are Northern Qi art and ethnicity, relationships between texts and images, and the multiple meanings of visual signs. The three principal artistic aspects of the caves may also be seen to correspond to major aspects of Buddhist practice and observance and to the classification of the principal manifestations of the Buddha, known as the trikaya, or "three bodies." At Xiangtangshan, the overlapping of the theme of Buddha's bodies with that of the bodies of emperors and courtiers indicates that the caves had political as well as religious significance and that they played an important role in the formation of the identity and ideology of the Northern Qi state.