| In the Northern Wei Dynasty, there came out a set of image which was called "Shenwang" in Buddhism cave temples and disappeared in Tang Dynasty. There must have some regularities in its appearance, development and disappearance. It is worth to discussion on where did the image of Shenwang came from and if there were some rules on put them together. Shenwang has a deep relationship to the society life, religion, and the spread of Buddhism, the policy of the ruling class then. There have been already much papers on Shenwang, but it isn’t so comprehensive because of a lack of data. I hope to learn more about Shenwnag through images of Shenwang and get my own opinions on Shenwang.I’ve found a lot of images of Shenwang, combining the papers of other people, and shows the whole procedure of Shenwang generated in China, got changed, and died because of the functional transformation; Inferring that the image of Shenwang came from India. The function of Shenwang changed in Tang dynasty due to some political factors. Thinking about the image and composition of Shenwang, they have different features and are easy to be recognized. But each of Shenwang changed much on styles, costumes, the way of being showed, and were added some new image or reduced some image as developing. So it is hard to recognize what it is according to the steel of Luozikuan and other people sculptured, even not able to say those new image are Shenwang or not. |
