On August 20, the exhibition “Bond of Scriptures Between North and South — Fine Rubbings of Shandong Cliff-Carved Buddhist Scriptures” opened at the Zhizhi Hall of Lingyin Temple in Hangzhou. The event was jointly hosted by Shandong Buddhist Association and Zhejiang Buddhist Association, and organized by Lingyin Temple.
The Northern Dynasties cliff-carved Buddhist scripture complexes of Shandong were conceived and hand-inscribed in red ink by the eminent monk Seng'an Daoyi, representing the paramount surviving legacy of northern China's Buddhist stone-carving tradition. Laid out along clear geographic lines, these cliff inscriptions encompass the Mahāsamnipāta Sūtra on Tieshan Hill in Zoucheng, the Lankāvatāra Sūtra on Gangshan Hill, the Vimalakīrti Sūtra on Geshan Hill, the Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra Spoken by Mañjuśrī on Yishan Hill, Buddha name carvings on Jianshan Hill, as well as the Diamond Sūtra on Mount Tai and Buddha name inscriptions on Hongding Mountain. The entire complex is designated a Major Historical and Cultural Site Protected at the National Level.
The calligraphy fuses the brushwork of seal, clerical, and regular scripts. With characters balanced between roundness and angularity, a powerful and expansive momentum, and robust, generous strokes, these works have been hailed by later calligraphers as "the origin of large characters and the ancestor of giant banner calligraphy." Breaking decisively with the prevailing small-script conventions of sutras copied on bamboo and wooden slips, these cliff carvings pioneered an unprecedented monumental cliff calligraphy system. As the most complete and largest surviving physical exemplar of the transition from clerical to regular script in the late Northern Dynasties, they furnish distinctive epigraphic evidence for studying the evolution of Chinese characters and the transformation of Northern Dynasties calligraphic styles.
Synthesizing calligraphy, Buddhism, historiography, landscape and humanity, as well as epigraphic culture, the Northern Dynasties cliff-carved Buddhist scripture complexes of Shandong stand as tangible monuments to the flourishing of Buddhism under the Northern Qi Dynasty—treasures of national rank within ancient Chinese stone-carving art and the developmental history of writing.
