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Albedil M., Ivanova K. Collection of E. E. Ukhtomsky: A Visual Narration of Images of the Sino-Buddhist Hell

Margarita Albedil
Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera) of the Russian Academy of Sciences
Saint Petersburg, Russian Federation
ORCID: 0000-0002-8805-2184
E-mail: albedil@inbox.ru 

Ksenia Ivanova
Saint Petersburg State University
Saint Petersburg, Russian Federation
E-mail: ksenia108@gmail.com

 

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ABSTRACT. The article is focused on the issues of description and attribution of several Buddhist objects (scrolls) from the MAE RAS collection No. 3253, which have not yet been studied. The collection is noteworthy first of all for the fact that its creator, Prince Esper Esperovich Ukhtomsky (1861–1921), was a prominent figure in Imperial Russia of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and is believed to have been one of the first ideologists of ‘Easternism’ and a harbinger of the concept of ‘Eurasianism’. As an expert in Oriental Studies, he collected the first and most complete collection of Buddhist art in Russia and, perhaps, in the Western world of the time. It contains unique Buddhist art items (of various purposes and styles), which can serve as no less important and informative sources for studies of religion and traditional culture than written documents. Part of the unique collection of Ukhtomsky is nowadays housed at the MAE RAS (Kunstkamera). The article provides a description and analysis of iconographic images and plots featured on six scrolls with scenes of afterlife trials in hell, as imagined according to Chinese Buddhism. In the remote past, these scrolls might have functioned as a form of visual preaching on the moral and ethical tenets of Buddhism. They provide an insight into the Sino-Buddhist concepts of afterlife and demonstrate the distinguishing features of Buddhist proselytism in China. The scrolls represent an important ethno-historical source, testifying to the interaction of Buddhism (which had originated in India and penetrated into China in the early first millennium AD) with Confucian and Taoist traditions and folk beliefs of the Chinese people. The authors’ study of these museum artefacts confirms that the Chinese tradition adopted and incorporated the Indo-Buddhist model of afterlife, having imparted a specific local flavour to it.

 

KEYWORDS: Ukhtomsky, Chinese collection, Buddhist scrolls, iconography, afterlife, judgment seat, images of the Sino-Buddhist hell

 

DOI 10.31250/2618-8619-2022-1(15)-168-179
УДК 7.046

 

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