temple art, and decorative and ritual arts throughout
this long period of growth, fluorescence, and develop-
ment that created one of the world’s truly magnificent
Buddhist art cycles.
Later Han (25 B.C.E.–220 C.E.), Three Kingdoms
(220–265/280 C.E.), and Western Jin
(265/280–317 C.E.)
Reliable written documents indicate the presence in
China of Buddhist temples as early as the mid-first cen-
tury C.E., during the Later Han dynasty. By the end of
the second century, records concerning the military of-
ficer Zerong describe his construction in Pengcheng
(northern Jiangsu) of a large storied pavilion “with
piled up metal plates on top” and a gilded buddha im-
age inside. Such a multistoried structure topped by
plates (chattra) also appears in a rare Later Han tomb
tile from Sichuan. These examples point to the exis-
tence of the Chinese-style pagoda or STUPAand the
presence of gilded buddha imagery by the late Later
Han period in China. Though the first major Buddhist
translation activity occurred in Luoyang during the
second half of the second century with the foreign
monks AN SHIGAOand Lokaksema, we have yet to see
any Buddhist art from that center for this period, with
the exception of the stone fragments of a curb encir-
cling a well that bear an inscription mentioning “the
san ̇gha of the four quarters” in Kharosthscript, another
indication of the undoubtedly potent foreign influences
in this early phase of Buddhist activity in China.
However, within the last several decades a few re-
mains have been presented as probable late Later Han
Buddhist imagery, most notably the splendid gilt-
bronze seated Buddha with flame shoulders in Har-
vard University’s Sackler Museum and a selection of
stone reliefs at the site of Kongwangshan in eastern
Jiangsu. The Harvard Buddha, of quite large size, has
long been cited as a major early sculpture of Gandharan
form, but has been shown to stylistically relate to Chi-
nese tomb art dating to the second half of the second
century and to sculpture from the site of Khalchayan
(ca. first century B.C.E. to first century C.E.) excavated
in southern Uzbekistan in ancient northern Bactria.
This image, probably the earliest known Buddha im-
age from China, appears to have its stylistic sources
more decisively in the Bactrian rather than the Gan-
dharan region. The Kongwangshan site consists of a
hill with its boulders carved with a variety of sculp-
tures in the late Later Han style. Among the images are
Xiwangmu (Queen Mother of the West), dancing fig-
ures in foreign dress (Kushan style), a seated and
standing buddha, a parinirvanascene, and a scene from
a JATAKAof the sacrifice of the bodhisattva to the starv-
ing tigress. Though simple, the images are icono-
graphically accurate and testify to Buddhist activity
that was somehow integrated with images of other
popular beliefs—a typical phenomenon in Late Han.
From the Three Kingdoms and Western Jin peri-
ods, a clear distinction emerged between images that
strictly follow orthodox Buddhist iconography and
those of popular, mostly funerary, art that incorporate
Buddhist elements, often with unorthodox changes.
The latter are various and found in a wide area of dis-
tribution. They include, for example, small seated bud-
dhas on ceramic vessels (some the elaborate hunping
funerary urns) and bronze mirrors (possibly as auspi-
cious talismans) in the south; buddhas on money trees
and clay tomb bricks in Sichuan; a standing bo-
dhisattva on a belt buckle from a tomb dated 262 from
Wuchang in Hebei; and reliefs in tombs such as at
Yinan in Shandong. On the other hand, the famous
gilt-bronze standing bodhisattva in the Fujii Yurinkan,
probably a MAITREYA, is of mainstream, orthodox im-
agery, stylistically related to contemporary sculptures
from Swat, Toprak Kala, and Miran. This bodhisattva
is said to have come from near Chang’an (present-day
Xi’an), where the great monk DHARMARAKSAwas ac-
tive with translating and teaching in the last half of the
third century.
By the end of the Western Jin Buddhism was reach-
ing a point of viability in China, albeit with the major
support of foreign monks and the foreign communi-
ties engaged in trade along the SILKROAD. Unfortu-
nately, just as the fall of the Han dynasty in the early
third century occasioned turmoil and mass migration
within China, so too, at the end of the Western Jin,
northern China collapsed into chaos from famines and
a series of disastrous invasions and warfare by north-
ern minorities. These events threw the country into
hardship for several decades and virtually transformed
the demographics of China as the aristocratic families
of the north fled south or to the Gansu region to es-
cape the devastation.Eastern Jin (317–420) in the south and the Six-
teen Kingdoms (317–439) in the north
The Eastern Jin provided some continuity to this
volatile, fluid, disruptive period. Most of our knowl-
edge of Buddhist art from the Eastern Jin comes from
written records, which speak of miraculous images,
King AS ́OKAimages, colossal buddhas (the oldest, ca.
370s, being that in DAO’AN’s (312–385) monastery atCHINA, BUDDHISTART IN