Kalavinka And The Relative Problem

Kalavinka is a kind of birds who always appears in Buddhist art, especially in the painting "Amitabha's Pure Land", and is considered commonly as an importation from Indian Buddhism. While the later view is doubtful to some degree. In china, the bird has human's face and hands. But by analyzing Buddhist scripture, which had the records of them, we can find that the bird hadn't the characteristic in India and central Asia. To find the answer, the author of this paper collected lots of materials of the bird in Chinese art and analyzed the course of their development. By this way, the conclusion that "Kalavinka" was created by Chinese in 7 century was gotten. And then, the paper traced the early form of the human-bird in China. There are evidences to show that the belief of human-bird at least has begun in BC 2 century in china and had been absorbed by immature Buddhist disciples in 6 century. At the third part of this paper, some problems related to Kalavinka were discussed, involving "flying human", "Garuda", "Jivajiva", "Kinnari" and some ambiguous elements in central Asia. At last, the history of the human-bird was discovered.