Recent scholarship on Chinese Buddhist art has taken many different approaches, ranging from the examination of broad themes (such as art and political authority) to studies of specific sites (such as Longmen and Dunhuang), specific figures (such as Guanyin), or specific texts (such as the Lotus Sutra). An-yi Pan's Painting Faith: Li Gonglin and Northern Song Buddhist Culture takes an altogether different tack and focuses on the art and cultural milieu of a single artist, the eleventh-century Chinese official Li Gonglin (1041–1106), I cannot think of another scholar in the field who has attempted anything similar, and Pan is thus to be commended for the originality of his approach.
Li Gonglin is among the best-studied artists of the Song period, and previous writings have largely concentrated on his status as an exemplar of the Confucian scholarly (or wenren) ideal. Pan's project, by contrast, is to recuperate the Buddhist dimensions of Li's life and art, which he believes have been almost willfully overlooked. Chapter 1 paints a literary picture of the influential and distinctive Chan Buddhist community associated with the Longmian Mountain region of Anhui Province, where Li was born and spent much of his life. Pan argues that the prevailing modes of thought to which Li was exposed there provided the specific Buddhist ontological concepts that formed the “basis on which Li Gonglin intellectualized and philosophized Buddhist painting” (p. 58). Chapter 2 analyzes Longmian Mountain Villa, a painting by Li of the garden compound he constructed, known now only from copies and written descriptions. Building on the work of Robert Harrist, who has written extensively about the literati and eremitic dimensions of the Mountain Villa, Pan convincingly contends that Li conceived of the site as a Buddhist Pure Land (p. 96).
The third chapter of the book presents Li Gonglin as an early Chan painter, a position clearly at odds with the typical characterizations of Li as a literatus extraordinaire. Pan's arguments here are somewhat murky, in part because the views of Chan painting he is seeking to challenge are based on largely outmoded scholarship. Surprisingly as well, Pan's discussion of Chan history and ideology completely ignores the seminal work of such scholars as John McRae, Bernard Faure, Griffith Foulk, and Robert Sharf, among others. Given the wealth of Buddhological and Sinological erudition on display throughout the book, this lapse must be viewed as deliberate, making it all the more inexplicable.
The final two chapters of the book are devoted to Li Gonglin's White Lotus Society paintings. This multiscenic subject, which goes back to the Tang dynasty, is one that Li is recorded to have executed multiple times and in a variety of formats, although these works, like Mountain Villa, are known today only from later copies and written descriptions. Pan compares Li's recorded interpretations of the various scenes against other examples and concludes that Li's distinctive treatment of the White Lotus can be viewed as a visual diagram that manifests and explicates his Buddhist practices and beliefs.
One shortcoming of Painting Faith, in my estimation, is its failure to engage questions of patronage and artistic motivation beyond the claim of its title—that is, that painting was simply the means by which Li expressed his Buddhist faith. What other forces and social circumstances might have impelled him to undertake these (and other) works of art? And what are we to make of the genesis of Li Gonglin's non-Buddhist works? As fervently as Pan wants to redefine Li as a Buddhist painter, rather than as a Confucian wenren, that does not alter the fact that the few extant works most likely to have come from Li's hand are of horses and secular figures. The illustrated Classic of Filial Piety, for example, remains one of Li Gonglin's masterworks, and one whose artistic achievement and cultural significance cannot easily be subsumed under the rubric of “faith.”
Painting Faith goes a long way toward restoring a previously neglected religious dimension to Li Gonglin's art and life, although viewing his oeuvre solely through the lens of Buddhist piety seems reductionistic. For nearly a millennium, Li has been rightly revered as a literati scholar who infused Chinese painting with new expressive possibilities, and if that view downplayed his Buddhist beliefs, the corrective is not to deny altogether his centrality to literati painting history.
While Painting Faith has all of the once-customary scholarly appurtenances (ample footnotes, extensive bibliography, Chinese characters throughout), it is regrettable that the illustrations are small, black and white, and generally of mediocre quality; at a list price of $218, buyers could not be faulted for expecting more. Nonetheless, this is a stimulating and impressive piece of scholarship, and one that will be of interest not only to historians of Chinese painting and cultural history, but to scholars of Chinese Buddhism as well.
