ИСТИНА

Imagery discusses the issue of image, or imagery. According to the Chinese, "intention" refers to the subject's perception of all things in the world, while "image" is the form in which things are perceived. As Buddhism continued to be localised in China, Buddhist art combined the expression of intention in Buddhist scriptures with art forms arising from indigenous Chinese concepts, and the fusion of the two contributed to the ideological reshaping of some of the early forms of Buddhist art in China. In this paper, we examine the decorative patterns and artistic characteristics of the murals of Mogao Cave 249 from the perspective of pictorial aesthetics, taking the flame motifs in the backlighting of the main Buddha niche on the west wall of Mogao Cave 249 as the object of our study. We explore the similarities and differences between the different forms of flame decoration and the origin of their images, and we try to understand the localisation of Buddhist art in the northern region from the Sixteen Kingdoms to the Northern and Southern Dynasties, taking into account the images in the tomb murals of the Western Han period.