Under the Fengxian Cliff: Reading Longmen from the Other Bank

The way to understand Longmen is to lose the overview. The study institute describes the site in geographic terms: it lies five kilometres south of Luoyang city, where Xiangshan and Longmen Shan face each other with the Yi River running between, so the place was anciently called the Yi Que, a natural gate. The caves are packed into a kilometre of cliff on both banks. The count is exact, and it is large: 2,345 niches, more than 100,000 statues and over 2,800 stelae and inscriptions. Excavation began around the time the Northern Wei court moved its capital to Luoyang, and work continued through the Eastern Wei, Western Wei, Northern Qi, Sui, Tang, Five Dynasties and Song. The Henan provincial government describes the 31.7-square-kilometre scenic area as four core parts: the western cliff, the eastern cliff, Xiangshan Temple and Bai Garden.

At the Fengxian Temple, the figures resolve into measurements. The main image is the Vairocana of the Fengxian Cave, built during the reign of Emperor Gaozong of Tang, in a shrine shaped like a horseshoe with a platform carrying nine large statues: one Buddha, two disciples, two bodhisattvas, two heavenly kings and two powerful warriors. The Buddha stands 17.14 metres, the head alone measures four metres and the ears 1.9 metres, and the institute's text describes the composition as one where the hierarchy is clear, the heights graded, the hard and soft balanced. The contrast with the smallest works is just as striking: in the Lotus Cave, a statue on the south wall is only two centimetres tall. Stone is not the only material on show either. The Prescriptions Cave holds what the institute calls China's earliest carved stone prescriptions, later collected into Japan's Ishinpo.

The gorge doubles as an archive of handwriting. The institute notes that Longgem's 2,800 stelae are unique among China's cave complexes, which is why the site is called the old stele forest, and that they give physical evidence for the study of ancient society, exchange between China and abroad, and the evolution of calligraphy. The North Wei inscription record yields the Longmen Twenty Pieces, the representative work of Wei-style stele calligraphy that carries Han clerical script into Tang regular script; from the Tang come the Yi Que Stele in the hand of Chu Suiliang and the Great Vairocana Cave Record, re-carved in the tenth year of the Kaiyuan era. Older in date but noisier in texture, Guyang Cave holds more than 1,500 niches and over 800 inscriptions, the largest single concentration of inscribed text in the complex.