Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 7.djvu/143

RV 119 It has been shown above that sculpture owed its origin in Japan to Buddhist influence. Whatever preceded the advent of Buddhism was too crude to deserve consideration. Buddhism came to Japan from India through China. The art of sculpture that it brought to China in its train did not receive any notable development in the latter country. It retained its Indian characteristics. The style was semi-barbaric; symbolism took the place of idealism; the power and attributes of divinity were expressed by distortions of the human figure or by colossal dimensions, and statuary never assumed shapes of beauty. The motives of the art were purely religious. It was an agent for enforcing a supernatural creed, not a medium for producing types of beauty.

In Japan, on the contrary, the art made great advances, but without any material change of direction. The sculptor rose to much higher ideals, but his types remained the same. He continued to be bound by a rule which naturally grew out of such a system,—the rule that all essentially human features should be avoided as far as possible. The influence of that rule was radical. It created at once an essential difference between the object of sculpture as conceived in Greece and endorsed in Europe, and its object as pursued in the East. The Grecian sculptor kept the beautiful always in view. Whatever elements of beauty and symmetry were discernible in the human form, these he sought to combine for the creation of his divine ideal. But the Japanese sculptor had nothing to do with beauty. His aim was to represent certain attributes which are virtually independent of graces of form, being essentially intellectual. What a statue of the Buddha has to suggest is majestic serenity and