All'alba dell'arte buddhista in Cina. Nuove proposte interpretative sull'icona del Buddha in meditazione.

The first representations of the Buddha in China (2nd-4th century) consist of an array of mostly undated bronze statuettes portraying the Buddha seated in dhyaønamudraø. Past scholarship has tended to consider these images the result of a straightforward, passive transmission from India, as though an object had been simply transported from one place to another and copied once it arrived at the final destination. The aim here is to show how, from the very earliest surviving works, the icon of the Enlightened One was on the contrary reinterpreted as part of a process that interacted with Chinese cultural conventions, rather than being a mere duplicate of Indian models. The argument centres on a detail that has so far been overlooked: even the very first of these specimens appear to invert the orthodox Indian position of the hands in the dhyaønamudraø. The implications and significance of this variation are examined with reference to the cosmological tradition, visual imagery and cultural context of China.