Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 7.djvu/132

RV 108 and flowing. It remained for the sculptors of a later era to rescue the art from these traces of effeminacy and carry it to its point of culmination. To Jōchō and his school, however, belongs the credit of having clearly indicated the route along which their country's artists were to travel to greatness. Of the kind of work that Jōchō was privileged to execute an idea is furnished by annals describing the temple Hōjō-ji, built by the celebrated Fujiwara Regent Michinaga. Upon the statues for that edifice, unfortunately destroyed by fire thirty-seven years after its completion, Jōchō expended the efforts of a lifetime. The principal idol, an effigy of Dainichi Nyorai sitting upon a hundred-petalled lotus, measured thirty-two feet in height; and grouped about it were a Shaka, twenty feet high, and numerous other figures nine feet in height. All these were in wood covered with gilding. In each of the five great halls stood a Fudo, twenty feet high, and four statues of Taison, sixteen feet in height. In the Amida hall were nine gilded statues of Mida, each sixteen feet, and the Shaka hall was peopled by a hundred effigies of the Buddha. There was, indeed, no lack of employment for the religious sculptors of that superstitious era. The four Emperors Shirakawa, Horikawa, Toba, and Shutoku (1071 to 1141) built six great and many small temples, and the sculptors Ensei, Chōen, Inkaku, Kenyen, Kōjō, and Incho filled them with statues. But it will readily be conceived by any student of Japanese history that art could not escape the influences which carried society to the extreme of sensuous luxury in the closing years of the Fujiwara epoch. By degrees the sculptor, abandoning the virile style of the Jōchō school, made delicacy and