Encyclopedia of India–China Cultural Contacts v2.c11.s4.t2.10

v2.c11.s4.t2.10

Binglingsi Caves (Binglingsi Shiku) Chinese Buddhist caves. It is located in Xiaojishi Mountain 35 km southwest of Yongjing County, Gansu Province, cut in succession from the Western Qin and Northern Wei Dynasties through to the Sui and Tang Dynasties. Now there are 196 cave shrines, 776 statues, and 912 sq mt of murals. The 169ᵗʰ cave of Bilingsi cut in the Western Qin period (385-430 CE) is the most important. In 1963, in the 6ᵗʰ shrine on the north wall of the 269ᵗʰ Binglingsi cave discovered an ink inscription of "Made on March 24ᵗʰ, the first Jianhong year (420) in Xuanxiao." This is the earliest known inscription in Chinese caves. The shrine statues in the caves can be divided into stone carving, stone modelled clay sculpture, and clay sculpture. Most of them are a Buddha with a bodhisattva or a Buddha with two bodhisattvas by the side. The modelling is profound and primitive, the face is squarely rounded, the nose is straight, and the lips are thick, with a heavy Indian style. The standing Buddha clay sculpture in the 7ᵗʰ shrine of the east wall wears a thin cassock stuck to the body in the through shoulder style; the single line intaglio draws out U-shaped cloth lines, that shows the profile of the whole body as if soaked with water, closely resembling the Mathura style Buddha portraits. even in the folds on the edge of the cassock and the gorgeous light on the neck, except that the eyes are wide open rather than half closed and downward looking, lack of that meditation expression on the face of the Gupta Buddha figures. In the 23ʳᵈ shrine on the south wall are five seated Buddha in meditation, the clothes lines in a single line intaglio for through shoulder cassock all spreading in a radial pattern from under the left shoulder, which is obviously affected by the imitation of the Gandhara style of Buddha figures in the western regions. In the caves are painted a preaching scene, Buddhas, bodhisattvas, flying Apsaras, providers, and other murals in the Western Qin, of which the character modelling, colour, composition are similar to that of early Qiuci caves. Around 420 AD, when the 169ᵗʰ Western Qin Cave built shrines and modelled statues in Binglingsi Caves, the Mathura style Buddha figure in Gupta, *India* approached the mature and prosperous stage, while in faraway ‘*Gansu of China*’, the Buddha figures resembled the Indian Gupta style statues, which naturally made people think of the specific means or intermediation by which the influence of Gupta-style Buddha statues spread so quickly, and in turn helps to infer that the Gupta-style Buddha statues with unclear chronology may have been mature in the latter half of the 4ᵗʰ century. The painted Buddha sculptures remained in the 275ᵗʰ, 254ᵗʰ, 251ˢᵗ, and 259ᵗʰ early caves of Dunhuang Caves from the middle or the latter half of the 5ᵗʰ century continued the modelling mode of the Western Qin caves in Binglingsi with the influence of Gandhara Buddha or Gupta-style Buddha figures.