Abstract

Religious Graphic Arts, is the beauty of a religious experience is one of the ways. By aesthetic experience, religious images is seeking to reveal the marvelous art of sacred unpredictable trail, implicitly Pro now. This article from the religious point of view of aesthetics, the image of Chinese Buddhist art of, for example, religious statues art of aesthetic meaning and value. This paper reviews the religious image of the aesthetic experience the phenomenon of secularization, that the art of contemporary religious studies and viewing images, tend to form and structure analysis based on purely aesthetic value of religious works, as distinct from religious worship of the mystery. As the emphasis on images in the form of earthly nature, so ignore the aesthetic level, pointing to a symbol of religious power. Secondly, to explore the beauty of religious images earthly value, pointing out that the Chinese Buddhist art of the beauty of earthly tendency, meaning the religious spirit is the flow of daily life from the myth, to make new art form. Third, this article will always walk in beauty that's there already appeared before the image, pointing to the endless passage of the trail there. The real temple where the priest feels like the artist to work with God for the sacrifice would be. Fourth, the redemption value of aesthetic experience, that the religious significance of aesthetic experience of salvation, not to forget the pain temporarily by a sense of joy and trouble, but is always aware of the beauty of all things point to the existence of things outside of their own otherness. Fifth, the Moon Water Guanyin statues, for example, explain the aesthetic experience of salvation and religious practice of close relationships. Finally, point out, only met with the beauty of the gods, came to realize that in order to temporarily reside in the sacred image of the beauty within presence. Religious art in form of picture and sculpture could be seen as a representational aesthetisation of religious experiences. Through the sense of beauty, experienced in beholding these artistic representations, the invisible trace of sacred world, which the religious art-works attempt to manifest, would shine itself in an eloquence of silence. The purpose of this essay is to investigate into the aesthetic meaning of Chinese Buddhist Icons and their artistic values, and thereby contribute to the aesthetics of religion. The first step of this paper is to exam the phenomenon of secularization of aesthetic experience in religious art, led especially by the demythologizing tendency of science and technology. It is equally pushed forward by theories of art such as formalism and structuralism, which claim that the beauty of art-works is based mainly on their form and structure. If the study of religious art ignores the symbolic power of sense of beauty which tends always to exceed the boundary of visible form and point to the invisible world, it will become inevitable that the art of religious images be secularized. The second step is to evaluate the aesthetic meaning of secularization in Chinese Buddhist art, such as Buddha's picture or Guanyin's image. The meaning of secularization does not consist in the fact of merging with the everyday life of common people, as some scholars would say, but rather in its consequence of delimiting richness of religious meaning within the established framework of rigid forms. The general tendency of secularization in Chinese Buddhist art transforms the myths and miracle tales prevailing among common people's faith into a new art form for artistic appreciation imbued with religious meaning. The third step of this paper will focus on the relation between sense of beauty and sense of religiosity. The sense of beauty, going far beyond established forms, is looking for the trace of Being in the process of vanishing. A true artist, in creating a Buddhist painting, does the same thing a priest does in his worship and sacrifice in the temple. The image Wu Daozi painted on the wall of the Tian-gong temple was not an imitation of the visible world, but a magical creation by encountering with sacred spirit . The fourth step is to discuss the redemptive function of aesthetic experience. We will argue that the meaning of aesthetic redemption does not consist in, due to aesthetic pleasure, forgetting temporarily the sufferance of daily life, but rather in understanding the beauty as referring always to the Other, that will rescue us from indulging in the seemingly beauty of established world and its rigid forms. The final step is to discuss the relation between aesthetic redemption and practice of self-cultivation. Inspired by the sense of beauty released by Water- Moon Guanyin image, Avalokite-śvara in Chinese style, Chinese Buddhist literati understood Avalokite-śvara as practicing the way of Bodhisattva. They used Water-Moon to symbolize the true nature of all beings as emptiness . For Chinese literati , the beauty of Water-Moon Guanyin not only refers to the understanding of Truth, but also to spiritual freedom achieved by way of self-cultivation. We will conclude that only in encountering with the divine in the sense of beauty released by religious art that we can experience the presence of a sacred world all of a sudden in a visible form