ABSTRACT
The survey trip Okakura Tenshin took to China in the 26th year of Meiji (1902) marked the beginning of a rush of Japanese art historical expeditions. Okakura was one of the founding fathers of the discipline of art history in Japan, and his framework of considering Japan to be part of one Asia and finding the roots of Japanese art, especially Buddhist art, in the continent, had a lasting influence on the academia. One such example is the argument on the stylistic origin of the earliest Buddhist statues in Japan, such as the famous bronze Shakyamuni Buddha triad in Horyuji (623 CE). During his trip to China, Okakura was especially fascinated by the Longmen Grottoes in the Henan province, taking notice of the close resemblance between the Horyuji image and the main Buddha image of the Binyang Middle Cave, created during the Northern Wei period. His observation seems to have set the direction of Japanese scholars to look towards northern China in considering the roots of this work, and this trend continued for quite some time. However, studies have since revealed that the influences seen in this important piece of work are far more complicated than was formerly assumed. This chapter will examine and introduce the development of the arguments regarding the origins of this work, which is one of the crucial pieces in considering the roots of early Japanese Buddhism.
