Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 7.djvu/137

RV 113 piece unapproached by any Korean or Chinese worker in any era, and presenting all the most obviously characteristic features of the best school of Japanese sculpture in the thirteenth century. There is no occasion to do such violence to reason and history. The figures are from the chisel of Jōkaku, a pupil of Unkei. Two other statues of Deva Kings may be instructively examined side by side with Jokaku's masterpiece. They are colossal images twenty-six and one-half feet high, which stand beside the gate of Tōdai-ji. Awe-inspiring and stupendous, they have been taken by nearly all subsequent sculptors as a classical type of the Two Guardians, and they well deserve that distinction. But the exaggerations which the artists (Unkei and Kwaikei) have resorted to in order to emphasise special attributes reduce the figures to a lower plane of achievement than the supreme eminence on which Jōkaku's Devas stand. The "Watch Dogs" of Tamuke-yama shrine are another example of Tōkei's bold imagination and powerful chisel. His conception of these superhuman animals is at once original and grand. Kōkei, a contemporary of Kwaikei and Unkei, left some works which are particularly interesting as examples of the realistic spirit animating the artists of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and the great care which they bestowed on all the accessory details of their sculpture. Kōben's "Demon-lantern-bearers" of Kofuku-ji are justly celebrated, and side by side with the savage perplexity of one imp and the vacuous stolidity of the other, may be placed a statue of Monjushiri, dating also from the thirteenth century, which, as a type of serene and contemplative benevolence, ranks not far below the Kamakura Dai-Butsu.