Buddha of Longevity

A native of Linquan, Jiangxi Province, Li Ruiqing passed the palace (jinshi) examination in 1895 and served as a scholar in the esteemed Hanlin Academy. After the founding of the Chinese Republic in 1912, he remained loyal to the fallen Qing dynasty (1644–1911) and took the sobriquet "Qingdaoren" (Qing Daoist). He moved to Shanghai and eked out a living selling his paintings and calligraphies.

This depiction of the Buddha of Longevity is highly unconventional and provocative. Instead of being shown in his Western Paradise, the Buddha sits alone in a cave, recalling the Chan (Zen) patriarch Bodhidharma meditating before a cliff face and bringing to mind the ideal of the individual pursuit of enlightenment through spiritual striving and physical austerity. Li's strident palette and intentionally naive drawing style may be intended to evoke the primary colors and archaic style found in Buddhist wall paintings of sixth- and seventh-century cave temples at Dunhuang, but his assertive contour lines and dynamic composition have a self-conscious quality that is distinctly modern. Li's inscription on a rock, which recalls the weather-worn monumental writings on cliffs, expresses the desire for release from an existence that, from a political point of view, he finds painful:

On the fifth day of the fifth month of 1917, Qingdaoren painted this Buddha of Longevity with respect. [I] pray that [I] will be reborn in the Western paradise and be released from this sordid existence forever. All people should have this good fortune.

(Robert H. Ellsworth et al., trans., Later Chinese Painting and Calligraphy, 1800-1950, 3 vols. [New York: Random House, 1987], vol. 1, p. 113)