Description:
This is a detailed study of two Chinese hanging scrolls in the Freer Gallery, identified by the author in 1954 as belonging to a famous Sung Dynasty set of 100 scrolls depicting the Five Hundred Lohans and preserved in the Daitoku temple in Kyoto.
Each of the Freer Gallery scrolls carried a long dedicatory inscription in gold. The gold had fallen off through wear, but the characters were made visible under ultra-violet light, and showed that the paintings were commissioned as a gift to the Hui-an temple, in Che-chiang Province, in 1178. The subjects are The Miracle at the Rock Bridge, by Chou Chi-ch’ang, and Lohans Laundering their Clothes, by Lin T’ing-kuei.
The present paper, recording this important discovery and a scholarly piece of research in Chinese Buddhist painting, is a prelude to a monograph which Dr. Fong prepared on the whole series of 100 paintings. Its scope is confined to a stylistic comparison of the two painters of the Freer scrolls with each other and with the Japanese copyist, an account of the rock bridge at the T’ien-t’ai Mountain and the legend associated with it, and an interesting addendum on the cult of the Lohans in Mahayana Buddhism.
