Stone Bodhisattva at Datong, China

Datong, in Shanxi Province, is the site of the Yungang Grottoes, the cliff-cut Buddhist cave temples sponsored by the Northern Wei court in the late fifth century and containing tens of thousands of stone-carved figures. The print depicts one of the bodhisattva attendants from these caves, recognizable by the pendant jewels, scarves crossing at the chest, and elongated proportions of the Wei style. Hiratsuka travelled in China during the wartime and postwar decades to study early Buddhist sculpture at its sources, and the Datong figures — pre-dating most surviving Japanese Buddhist statuary — held particular significance as upstream models for the Asuka work he documented at Horyu-ji and elsewhere. The black-and-white mokuhanga registers the bodhisattva as inked silhouette against unworked [washi](/glossary/washi), the chisel marks across the carved drapery legible as both the original sculptor's cuts and Hiratsuka's own, collapsing the distance between the fifth-century stone-carver and the twentieth-century [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) printmaker.