Coordinated by Prof. Rajiv Ranjan, Shanghai University, China
Sāma/Syama Jataka in China
Speaker: Prof. Li Ling, Institute of Taoism and Religious Culture, Sichuan University, China
Introduction: Prof. Rajiv Ranjan
Chair: Prof. Y.S. Alone, Professor, School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University
The story of Sāma/Shyama/Shravan has been known to the Chinese people since about the third century A.D. through the spread of Buddhism. Sāma images appear in China, starting from the far west of China: Xinjiang, where Buddhism first came to China, and heading east to Dunhuang, from the 4th and 5th centuries to the 7th century. The images are very typical and highly recognizable, inheriting a type that has been fixed since Sanchi stupa in the first century B.C. However, around the 7th and 8th centuries, another kind of filial son image appeared in Dunhuang and Sichuan: the image of a son carrying his parents on his shoulders, which was considered to a pagan image and which appeared in the “Spurious scriptures” Bao En Jing. Why is the second type of Sāma considered an image of paganism – the opposite of Buddhism since the eighth century or so?
