Ancestor portraits at Mogao Cave 231

Abstract

The nearly five hundred decorated Mogao Caves at Dunhuang house an estimated 484,250 square feet (45,000 square meters) of murals that shed light on Chinese Buddhist practices from the fifth to fourteenth centuries. Cave 231, circa 839 C.E., is the family cave of the distinguished Yin family. On the eastern wall of the cave interior, a painted figural group above the entrance marks a notable shift in patronage practices at this important Silk Road site. The integration of these “secular” figures into a Buddhist cave complicates the separation established by both medieval Chinese authors and modern scholars of Buddhist art between practices of familial commemoration and religious devotion. Medieval authors argued that native Chinese values of Confucian filial piety were incompatible with imported practices of Buddhist social renunciation. Modern scholars have similarly described filial piety and Buddhist devotion as falling into the mutually opposing categories of the secular and the sacred, respectively. The ancestor portraits in Cave 231 at Mogao challenge the historical tendency to represent these categories in strict opposition to one another, demonstrating instead their fluid and contingent nature.