The Longmen statue was carved in the seventh year of Emperor Xiaowen of the Northern Wei Dynasty (483), and continued to be carved in the Eastern Wei Dynasty, the Western Wei Dynasty, the Northern Qi Dynasty, the Sui and Tang Dynasties, the Ming and Qing Dynasties, which lasted for more than a thousand years. More than 2,300 caves have been opened on the cliffs on both sides of Yishui, with more than/kloc-0,000 statues and nearly 3,000 inscriptions. Inscriptions on statues generally range from "the time of sculpture" to "the name of the statue".

Detailed Statues of Wang Yuan in Beihai

This treasure house of statues and inscriptions has never been valued by epigraphists in the past, and its value in literature and calligraphy has never been recognized. It was not until the Qianlong and Jiaqing years of the Qing Dynasty that several masterpieces of Longmen statues appeared-Shi, Sun Qiusheng, Wei Lingzang, and Wang Xie. , began to enter the field of vision of a few epitaphs, they abandoned the vulgar customs of Christmas. For example, Bi Yuan's "Burning the Monument in Zhongzhou", Qian Daxin's "Inscription and Postscript in Qianyantang", Wuyi's "Inscription and Postscript in Jiaotang", Wang Chang's "Inscription Collection" and Hong's "Reading Inscription" all have sporadic records, ranging from two or three to five or six, but there was no name of "Longmen Four Products" at that time.

Statues of monks and Taoists

In the thirty-third year of Qianlong (1768), Qian Daxin's Postscript to the Stone of Thousand Words Hall recorded the inscription of the Longmen Statue at the earliest, but only Yang Dayan was included. In the forty-sixth year of Qianlong (178 1), the sequel to The Epilogue of a Thousand Words Hall included an article by Sun Qiusheng, celebrating four years. On the other hand, there are 50 Tang and Han steles, 269 Tang steles, and only 3 Longmen statues, so we can imagine their importance. In the fifty-third year of Qianlong (1788), the Golden Annals of Zhongzhou written by Bi Yuan, the governor of Henan Province, only included four statues of stone, Sun Qiusheng and Wang Xie. At the same time, only two pieces, He Wei, were included in the "Golden Postscript for Giving a Hall" by Henan fellow villagers on May 1st, with attached articles. There are more than 20 kinds of popular characters advocated by Wuyi, but from the perspective of their existence, they are also chaotic and lack of famous products, which is very different from the later Longmen Twenty Products. These phenomena fully reflect the basic situation of the spread and research of Longmen statues in Qianlong period-not paying attention to it, spreading and collecting less.

Today's recognized "Longmen Carving Inscriptions" are located at the top of the north and south walls of Guyang Cave and at the top of the cave. Guyang Cave, formerly known as "Cave Temple", is the first cave excavated in Longmen Grottoes, with a depth of about13m, a height of about1/m and a width of about 7m. In the Qing Dynasty, the Taoist priest changed the statue of Sakyamuni enshrined in the cave into the Tao Te Ching of Taishang Laojun.

Wang statue

In the first year of Jiaqing (1796), Huang Yi took an extension worker to Longmen Grottoes and erected a high platform to extend the monument, which officially kicked off the spread of "Exquisite Carved rubbings in Longmen". However, it is not easy to spread the cliff with a three-story statue inscription. Huang Yi's Diary of Luo Song's Visit to the Monument records: "According to the workers carving the Longmen, the monks copied it and helped. The monk knew that there was the word' Kaiyuan' on the niche at the top of a cave, so he climbed up and took a piece of paper. A small piece of rubbings is hard-won, and the efforts to reach the top are beyond people's reach. ..... In the Longmen Cave, I saw the words' Datang Yonglong' engraved on the top and turned it into a huge book. At the moment when Laojun Cave was at the top, it was risky to frame wood, but it was still inaccessible, just sighing. "This passage in Huang Yi's diary reflects the hardship and difficulty in spreading the inscription on the Longmen Statue, and the greatest excitement of Ganjia epigraphy scholars lies in the discovery of the inscription in the Tang Dynasty, rather than the statue of the Northern Wei Dynasty, which we regard as the Longmen Classic today, because the core of academic concern at that time was the Han and Tang steles.

Statues of monks born in Dharma circles

See also the inscription of eight years of Xianfeng in the stone statue of the National Library (1858): "This Longmen stone carving is the best in the world, carved in, and unique in ancient times. The cliff is high and steep, and it is extremely difficult to expand. After Liu Yanting's expansion, there is no interest. " Song Qian's inscription and postscript once again confirmed that few people circulated the Longmen Statue in Jia Dao period, and the reason why its rubbings were rare was mainly restricted by the traditional concept of attaching importance to the inscription and postscript in the Han and Tang Dynasties and neglecting the statue in the Northern Wei Dynasty, except for the realistic conditions such as "steep cliffs". The exquisite rubbings of the Longmen Statue were only circulated among a few high-end epigraphy scholars.

Part of "The Hui Cheng Portrait of a Bhikkhu"

During the Daoguang period, Guyangdong successively welcomed two super "stone gods". In addition to spreading the "four products of Longmen" on the high platform, the inscriptions of other statues in Longmen Grottoes were also widely spread. One of them is Fang Lubi, who wrote A Que Shi Burning and searched for more than 800 kinds of statues. One is Liu Xihai, the author of Longmen Statues Collection in Jiayin County, with more than 900 statues. This is a signal that the Longmen Statue has begun to "revive", which shows that the spring breeze of epigraphy has blown to the Longmen Statue Group, a "poor village child" that no one cared about in the past, and has blown to every corner outside Guyang Cave. This is the signal that the Longmen statue began to "transport". However, at that time, the rubbings of Longmen statues were still not widely valued by the collection circle of inscriptions, and their circulation and sales were still sporadic, which had not yet become a popular variety in the collection.

After nine years of Tongzhi (1870), the spread of Longmen Statue took a turn for the better. The former Henan satrap recruited workers to spread the Longmen statue, and at the same time the name of "Ten Products of Longmen" appeared. According to the inscription on the tablet of Linde, the former prefect of Henan Province, printed on the south wall of Guyang Cave, the text says: "Qing! Sun Bao, Hou Taifei, Helan Khan, Xiang Hui, Xie Yuan, Da Jue, Niu Ju, Gao Shu, Yuan Xiang, Yun Yangbo. " This time, local officials and monks and nuns participated in the communication project together, which was a "feat" and opened the way for the large-scale commercialization of Longmen statues in the future.

Part of the statue of Gan Hui.

The appellation of "Ten Products of Longmen" may be based on "Four Products of Longmen"-Shi, Sun Qiusheng, Wei,. Although there were a few rubbings in Qianlong, Jiaqing and Daoguang periods, most of them were circulated in the form of Longmen Sanwu products, which were called "Longmen Four Products".

The statue of Wei Lingzang

After nine years of Tongzhi (1870), on the basis of the four products of Longmen and the ten products of Longmen, six products were added, namely, a bhikkhu's dharma, a bhikkhu's feeling, a Buddha, Sima Jieboda, Yuan You and Udayana, which became the goal of the "Twenty Products of Longmen".

Since then, the situation that the inscription on the Longmen Statue was neglected during the reign of Jia Dao was reversed after the publication of Twenty Pieces of Longmen in the reign of Tongzhi, and the Twenty Pieces eventually became the classic representative of the Longmen Statue. Linde, the former prefect of Henan Province, initiated the naming form of "Pin" to collect and present Longmen statues, which is undoubtedly a pioneering work.

The Statue of Emperor Xiaowen in Yang Dayan

However, the widespread spread and deep-rooted popularization of Longmen Twenty Products still have a process of social acceptance. In the early years of Guangxu, Lu Zengxiang's masterpiece of epigraphy, Collation of Stone Carvings in Baqiong Room, included 23 paragraphs of Longmen Mountain Statue (from Taihe to Jingming) and 98 paragraphs of Longmen Mountain Statue (from Zhengshi to Yongxi), but did not use the name of "Longmen Twenty Products". At the same time, Wei Yuan was included in Wang Yan's epigraphy monograph Twelve Records of the Stone. See also Pan Jiuji's Twenty Pieces of Longmen (written by Pan Shushu when he was an official in Henan in the early years of Guangxu), which contains the title of "Wei Yuan Monument" and "Twenty Pieces of Longmen" written by Pan in the first month of the 10th year of Guangxu (1884). According to the above cases, it can be seen that from Tongzhi to the early years of Guangxu, the spread and social impact of Longmen Twenty Products was extremely limited.

Part of Zhang Yuanzu's Buddha statue

In the 17th year of Guangxu (189 1), a bigger "pusher" came, that is, Kang Youwei's "Two Ships of Light and Justice" was published, which immediately became a "best seller" of epigraphy at that time, and reprinted 18 copies. Kang Youwei promoted the calligraphy of Twenty Pieces of Longmen to the height of "Longmen Style", and "Ten Beauties in Weibei" and "Respecting Wei from the Tang Dynasty" began to take root in people's hearts, and the calligraphy of the Northern Wei Dynasty became popular, which directly led to the rapid increase of the circulation of Twenty Pieces of Longmen, and the rubbings entered the homes of ordinary people and became the hottest famous products in the collection of rubbings at that time.

Part of the statue of Zheng Changyou

In fact, the wide acceptance of Longmen Twenty Products is not only based on Kang Youwei's ascent, but also based on the spread of Longmen Extension in Luoyang during Guangxu period. The social circulation of Erpin is the real reason for its fame, and Kang Youwei is only the last straw. From then on, Luoyang Beijia can safely package and sell Longmen carvings, and 20 products have become the "business experience" of stone tablet sales.

In the year, Fang Ruo's Essays on School Monuments came out, replacing Udayana, a Tang edition that had been mistakenly printed in Twenty Products, with Ma Su Worship, a Wei edition, which became a new edition of Longmen Twenty Products, and was called Ma Su Worship. In the 24th year of the Republic of China (1935), Han Hede of Gaozhuang Village, Longmen Town, Luoyang smashed the lower part of the statue of Wei Lingzang while erecting a ladder at midnight. In the same year, villager Marford smashed more than half of the statue of Sheppard. Since then, "Ma Su Worship Ben" and "Longmen Twenty Products" have become a set of incomplete books.

Longmen ershipin

There are many versions of Longmen 20 products so far, and the author divides them into six versions.

1. "Longmen Twenty Products" circulated during Tongzhi period is called "Original Collection Extension".

2. The rubbings made in the 17th year of Guangxu (189 1) before the publication of Zhou Guangyi Double List are called "Guangxu First Edition" or "Uber King Edition".

3. The rubbings after the 17th year of Guangxu in Qing Dynasty (189 1) are called "Guangxu Late Edition" or "Uber Wang Late Edition".

4. The rubbings in the early years of the Republic of China were called "Ma Zhen worships this book".

5. The rubbings after the 24th year of the Republic of China (1935) are called "Ma Zhen worships the disabled".

In the 6.70s, a number of Longmen Grottoes were circulated, which were called "near rubbings".

At the end of the Qing Dynasty and the beginning of the Republic of China, while spreading Longmen fine works, it also spread the complete works of Longmen statues. For example, in the 16th year of Guangxu (1890), Changbai Feng got 1500 product, and in the 24th year of Guangxu (1898), Miao got 165438 product. In the fourth year of the Republic of China (19 15), Luoyang county magistrate once won 1700 products, in the twenty-third year of the Republic of China (1934), Qian wangcuo won 3680 products, and in the twenty-fourth year of the Republic of China (1935).

At that time, in bookstores in the north and south of the Yangtze River, in addition to the four products of Longmen and the twenty products of Longmen, the good Samaritan also published fifty products of Longmen and one hundred and fifty products of Longmen, among which the best-selling and most classic one was the twenty products of Longmen.

The spread of "Longmen Twenty Products" is an excellent case with certain universality, which subverts people's traditional imagination of the prosperity of Ganjia Jinshi. From the analysis of rubbings collected by public institutions at home and abroad, it can be seen that the peak of epigraphy appeared after Tongguang, not during the Ganjia period, which was generally imagined in the past. Epigraphy has experienced its enlightenment, recovery, rising to the peak, and it has been accepted for more than one hundred years.