Recent scholarship on Chinese Buddhist art has taken many different approaches, ranging from the examination of broad themes (such as art and political authority) to studies of specific sites (such as Longmen and Dunhuang), specific figures (such as Guanyin), or specific texts (such as the Lotus Sutra). An-yi Pan's Painting Faith: Li Gonglin and Northern Song Buddhist Culture takes an altogether different tack and focuses on the art and cultural milieu of a single artist, the eleventh-century Chinese official Li Gonglin (1041–1106), I cannot think of another scholar in the field who has attempted anything similar, and Pan is thus to be commended for the originality of his approach.

Li Gonglin is among the best-studied artists of the Song period, and previous writings have largely concentrated on his status as an exemplar of the Confucian scholarly (or wenren) ideal. Pan's project, by contrast, is to recuperate the Buddhist...

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