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Recent Japanese Literature on the Hōrūji Frescoes
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 March 2011
Extract
In an earlier publication I reported briefly on the irreparable damage caused to the Hōryūji Kondō by the fire of January, 1949. After the almost total destruction of the great series of mural paintings that had been preserved there since the eighth century, there is a melancholy timeliness in collecting the last studies made by Japanese on their once priceless National Treasure. I continue, therefore, with a summary of several publications on the Hōryūji frescoes that have appeared in Japan since the beginning of the war: three articles by Tanaka, Kobayashi, and Sawa, and a book by Haruyama. Since the last, published in 1947, has not been long in my possession, I have not attempted so far to read more than the author's final chapter of “conclusions,” and to check his identifications of the controversial subjects of the Kondō panels. The book has been praised by Sawa as epoch-making because of the exceptionally fine illumination under which the author's study of the paintings was made. It seems a work as comprehensive in purpose as the fine monograph published in 1932 by Naitō, for acquaintance with which Western readers owe so much to the expert translation by Acker and Rowland.
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References
1 Soper, , “The Fire in the Hōryūji Kondō,” Oriental Art, II, 2, p.Google Scholar
2 Tanaka, Shigehisa
in Kōkogaku Zasshi 
, XXXII, 12, 1942Google Scholar; English title-page has “A Study of the Wall Paintings of Kondo of Horyuji.” Kobayashi, Taichirō 
in “Ars Buddhica,” Bukkyō Geijutsu 
. III, 1949; title-page has “Study of the Murals in the Golden Hall of Horyuji Temple.” Sawa, Ryūken 
in Ibid., title-page giving “Composition of the Murals in the Golden Hall of Horyuji Temple.”
3 Haruyama, Takematsu
, Hōryūji Hekiga 
. Ōsaka, 1947.Google Scholar The enclosed English summary by Miss Sakanishi gives the author's name wrongly as “Mr. Takematsu.”
4 Naitō, Tōichirō
, Hōryūji Hegika no Kenkyū, Ōsaka, 1932.Google Scholar Translation by W. R. Acker and B. Rowland, Jr., Baltimore, 1943, under the title The Wall-paintings of Hōryūji.
5 Soper, , The Evolution of Buddhist Architecture in Japan, Princeton, 1942, pp. 297 ff.Google Scholar
6 Haruyama, , op. cit., pp. 8 ff.Google Scholar
7 Ishida, Mosaku
in Kōkogaku Zasshi, XXXIII, 6, 1943Google Scholar; title-page giving “Pros and Cons of the Reconstruction of Hōryūji.”
8 Soper, , Evolution, pp. 23 ff.Google Scholar
9 Ibid., p. 299. Adachi died in 1941.
10 As a sign of the later standardization, it may be noted that the Sung History, 490, describes the Byzantine coinage of the late 11th century as showing the figure of a throned Mi-lo (Miroku, Maitreya)-that being a natural Chinese interpretation of the throned, haloed figure of Christ.
11 In his preface to the translation of Naitō, p. 3.
12 I shall deal with this paradoxical type in a later installment of my series on “Literary Evidence for Early Buddhist Art in China.” The inscriptions, which sometimes speak in the clearest way possible of a pair—using the inventory formula “twin Mi-lo, one statue”—do not explain its meaning. Sawa thinks the reference may be to the dual character of the Bodhisattva in respect to time: he is at once the deity who presides now over a desirable Paradise, Tusita, and the saviour whose eventual coming is to usher in a golden age.
13 Soper, , Evolution, pp. 46–47.Google Scholar
14 Much time could be spent collecting evidence of the rate at which painters in China and Japan carried out their commissions within the complex rules of Buddhist iconography. I shall trouble to add here only a reference to the well-known anecdote about Ku K'ai-chih, who presumably was limited to one precise, finely detailed style. He is said to have carried out a mural painting of Vimalakīrti, without assistants, in a little over a month (Li-tai Ming Hua Chi, V). If the Hōryūji inventory omitted any mention of the frescoes, it was probably because, not being removable, they were considered an integral part of the building, and so were included under the single heading, Kondō.