Encyclopedia of India–China Cultural Contacts v2.c11.s4.t2.7

v2.c11.s4.t2.7

mixed with Indian and Persian styles. The Buddha portraits of Dunhuang murals are generally dressed in a coat in exposed right shoulder style or through shoulder style. One kind of the clothes lines are thick in texture, with a trace of Gandhara sculpture; another kind are thin and stick to the body, referred to as "Cao's clothes out of the water", is a typical feature of the Mathura Buddha portrait in *Gupta*, India. The Bodhisattva generally wears Indian-style three-jewel coronet or splendid suma-mala of the Western Regions, big Persian scarf on the shoulder, jade necklace on the breast, and presents a slender body that shows the three fold style common in Indian art. This dress is a mixture of Indian and Persian customs. Compared to the flying Apsaras in Qiuci murals, the flying Apsaras in Dunhuang Caves are soft in profile, dynamic and lively, with long ribbons dancing in the air, as if the whole wall was moving in the wind. In early Dunhuang murals, some appeared as multi-headed and multi-armed Hinduism Dharmapala images, such as the Mahesvara with three heads and six arms riding a black ox on the north mural of the main shrine of the rear wall in the 285ᵗʰ cave (the Western Wei Dynasty) of Mogao Caves, four-armed Skanda riding on a peacock, Ganesha holding a trident with the head of an elephant and the body of the man, and Vishnu with three heads and six arms in the mural on the south wall. In the Dunhuang murals is also a method of Indian traditional paintings from the Western Regions, i.e., the concave and convex method, namely to show the three dimensional effect of the characters' skin through colour shading. The concave and convex method in India murals is to shade the depth of the same colour; after introduced into Qiuci, it changed back into single-sided shading, double-sided shading, rendering, superimposed shading and other techniques. After being introduced in Dunhuang, it changed into multi-layered superimposed circle shading, from light to dark with clear-cut colour gradations. The concave and convex method in Dunhuang Caves was mainly popular in the murals of the Northern Dynasties, and gradually disappeared in the Sui and Tang Dynasties.