Seeing as Worldmaking: Ten Views of a Lingbi Rock and Yogācārin Epistemology in Late Ming China

Abstract

This paper examines Wu Bin’s (c. 1543–c. 1626) Ten Views of a Lingbi Rock (1610) from the perspective of Buddhist epistemological notions in seventeenth-century China. In studying a series of gazes focusing on a single object—a stone with a very complex surface—my discussion posits an act of excessive seeing as a process of making worlds. I take a theoretical cue from contemporaneous intellectual discourses, especially those that flourished with the revival of Yogācāra Buddhism in late Ming China. This paper will show how an art object comes into being in perceivable worlds interconnected by the individual’s sensory experiences. My study aims to inquire into the role of illusion as sensory experiences, phenomenological processes, and even notions of soteriological efficacy beyond formal artistic devices. To that end, this paper is the first attempt to situate Ten Views of a Lingbi Rock alongside Buddhist thoughts and artmaking.

1. Introduction

In 1610, the professional painter Wu Bin (c. 1543–c. 1626) completed a painting of a stone after spending a month examining it. The commission for the painting was from the prominent official, calligrapher, and collector Mi Wanzhong (1570–1628). Currently known as Ten Views of a Lingbi Rock, this scroll contains ten near-life-size renditions of one particular stone that Mi acquired sometime between 1608 and 1610, meticulously captured from ten different angles (Figure 1).1 The resultant painting attests to Wu Bin’s painstaking painterly method by revealing schematic configurative lines and masterfully controlled ink tonalities. Every stroke claims truth in reconstructing the object, and yet, at the same time, delves ever further away from naïve realism into the realm of fantasy; while each step of the process burgeons from an association with the rock, the total impression becomes one of fiction rather than faithful representation. Such paradoxical status of the depicted stone is incorporated with a real-time process—observation.

Ten Views of a Lingbi Rock, created during the late years of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), marks a significant moment in the history of Chinese painting by presenting a moment in which the painterly quest for unobstructed vision becomes an object of critical uncertainty, and hence inquiry, in and of material reality itself. Existing studies on Ten Views of a Lingbi Rock, by and large, are built upon notions of the artist’s romantic authorial subjectivity, fetishized eccentricity, and, most of all, the Eurocentric idea of realism.2 What has been lost in the scholarly discussion is attention to objects related to sensory experience and perception, both concerning the pictorial presentation and conceptual construction.3

This paper, therefore, proposes that Ten Views of a Lingbi Rock may be better understood with reference to questions about seventeenth-century notions of reality and illusion, informed by the tension between perceiving selves and perceived objects. In my discussion, illusion will not be limited to its narrow association with verisimilitude, spatial illusionism, or naturalistic mimesis within the European artistic tradition. My exploration of Ten Views of a Lingbi Rock shall inquire into various dimensions of illusion as sensory experiences, phenomenological processes, and even notions of soteriological efficacy in addition to formal artistic devices. In studying a series of gazes focusing on a single object—a stone with a very complex surface—this paper posits an act of seeing as a process of making worlds.4 I take a methodological cue from contemporaneous intellectual discourses, especially those of Buddhist epistemology and metaphysics that flourished with the revival of Yogācāra Buddhism in the late Ming period. This study will show how an art object comes into being in perceivable worlds interconnected by the individual’s experiences.5

1.1. Collective Views

Ten Views of a Lingbi Rock consists of ten pictures of a rock, each paired with Mi Wanzhong’s inscription, and colophons written by Mi himself and eleven others: Ming dynasty elites Dong Qichang (1555–1636), Li Weizhen (1547–1626), Ye Xianggao (1559–1627), Chen Jiru (1558–1639), Zou Diguang (1550–1626), Zhang Shiyi (1575–1633), Gao Chu (jinshi in 1598), Xing Tong (1551–1612), and Huang Ruheng (1558–1626); Manchu officials Saying’a (1779–1857) and Qiying (1787–1858) in the Qing dynasty (1644–1912). With these colophons, the painting comprises a 27-m-long handscroll. Next to each “view” in the scroll, Mi Wanzhong begins his inscriptions by clarifying the direction of the angle from which the stone is viewed: (1) a frontal view from the front (2) a frontal view from the rear (3) a frontal view from the left (4) a frontal view from the right (5) a view from the front left (6) a view from the front right (7) a view from the rear right (8) a view from the rear left (9) a view of the bottom from the front (10) a view of the bottom from the rear.

In the scroll, the rock is meticulously inspected like a subject of scientific study, removed from its natural environment. Each inscription begins with the point of perspective and then inventories the measurement of individual features. For example, the first view begins:

This is the straight frontal view from the front of the rock. The height of the middle peak is one chi seven cun, about two cun lower than the peak behind it. Seven cun from the top, there again forms a small peak; there are over ten small craggy peaks emerging above and below it. …Eight cun below the left flank of the mountain, another peak rises to six cun eight fen high, whose end is flat at its end and branches off into three.6

These inscriptions make each view penetrable by fixing the direction of the gaze. Even within the given view, Mi Wanzhong examines and describes smaller peaks from different angles as forming myriad other views therein. The text and image of each view also carefully delineate how these smaller parts engage with each other and condition their visibility. Minute details simulated by the painting lure the eyes close to the painting surface, a stage of a particular stone. In verbalizing the spectacle, Mi Wanzhong employs stage left and right to define the viewpoint, a common mode of writing for religious images in East Asia, thereby elevating the status of the stone to a subject of worship. The depicted stone stands almost as an icon and as a mirror, reflecting our gazes (Marion 1995, pp. 10–12).

The repetitive act of measuring is one of the unprecedented aspects of Ten Views of a Lingbi Rock. Mi Wanzhong’s thoroughgoing documentation allows us to estimate the rock’s height as one chi nine cun five fen, which is about 63.7 centimeters. The one depicted in the painting is smaller, measuring approximately 51 centimeters high. Wu Bin precisely scaled down the size so that the eyes under the guidance of painstaking measurement can do the computation to complete the stone’s actual overall form. This process is somewhat analogous to current-day photogrammetry.7 On the other hand, Mi Wanzhong shifts his writing mode from a descriptive one to an expressive one. Once his statement on Wu Bin’s painting process is concluded, Mi Wanzhong suddenly starts to negate the corporeality of the stone itself. Then, almost like the picture of Dorian Gray in the eponymous novel by Oscar Wilde, Mi Wanzhong says that the painting seems to be transformed into the rock. Throughout Mi’s close visual perception of his Lingbi rock and the painting, the stone itself ceased to exist as a material entity, while the painting took over the rock’s materiality. After presenting grandiloquent descriptions of the rock, suddenly, Mi clears his mind and concludes the colophon by measuring the stone again and counting the peaks as if the precise measurement was the only way to endorse the rock’s presence.

In his colophon, Mi Wanzhong recounts how Wu Bin endeavored to transfer his fixed gaze onto paper. After examining the rock for a month, Wu proceeded to complete the ten views as follows:

[Wu] examined it so thoroughly from morning to night that his consciousness merged with it. Then, taking up a piece of old paper, he first painted it from the front and back, but he was not done with his painting. He continued portraying the left and right sides, but the painting was still not finished yet. He went around the stone and portrayed the front, back, left, and right sides diagonally. With the bottom from the front and from the back, [Wu completed] ten views in all.8

Striking in Mi Wanzhong’s testimony is that Wu Bin literally “exhausted his skill” in completing the scroll with the tenth aspect of the stone. The unique texture with white veins and twisting morphology in the painting can be compared to the entry on the Lingbi rock, a limestone from the Lingbi township in Anhui Province, in the reputable compendium Stone Catalogue of Cloudy Forest by the Song dynasty polymath Du Wan (active ca. 1130) (Du Wan, shang:1a–2a).9

As Mi Wanzhong’s words suggest, the number ten was not randomly chosen. Yet ten views far exceed what Du Wan considered the ideal number of views for the finest Lingbi rock. In most cases, Du writes, they have one or two displayable sides (mian, literally meaning face), sometimes three, but one or two out of a hundred pieces of them have four.10 Even the tall, awe-inspiring ones owned by the famous Mr. Zhang of Lingbi had two or three views, but one of those was often covered with condensed mud and had to face the wall when displayed. Mi Wanzhong’s Lingbi with ten clear views, despite its smaller size, must have been beyond Du Wan’s imagination. Notwithstanding Mi Wanzhong’s effort to underline the significance of having ten views, recent studies on Ten Views of a Lingbi Rock suggest that the painting initially contained eight views and only later were two more views added (Zhu 2017, p. 106). Such understanding comes from a misreading of an account by Mi Wanzhong’s acquaintance Zhang Nai (1572–1630). In an account composed to praise his friend with the surname Fan and courtesy name Darenzi, Zhang Nai recalls a gathering at Mi Wanzhong’s residence with several other people (Zhang Nai, 11:47b–48b). Zhang describes a painting of a “spiritual rock (lingshi)”, which consists of eight views. As the guest named Yang He (?–1635) in the gathering said it should have ten views, the poet Long Ying (1560–1622) inscribed “not-not real rock (feifei shi)” as if “he was going through ten views with a single brush stroke.”11

Zhang Nai never identified who painted the “spiritual rock”, which could be a generic nomenclature of odd-looking decorative rocks and must be distinguished from the specific type of rock, Lingbi. Nor did he indicate that Long Ying added two more pictures in addition to his inscription. When only the names of the poet and calligrapher are given, what was added to the scroll was more likely to be a piece of calligraphy that corresponded to the existing eight pictures. Furthermore, it should be noted that Wu Bin created multiple paintings of rock in Mi Wanzhong’s collection.12 The painting of a spiritual rock mentioned by Zhang Nai could be one of those paintings. Above all, Ten Views of a Lingbi Rock itself hardly supports the claim that the painting originally had eight views. None of the colophons mentions such a possibility, while the paper and inkwork are consistent throughout the ten views. Moreover, the painting process upon which Mi elaborates in his colophon implies that the scroll contained ten images at the time of its production. The location of Wu Bin’s signature in the last view of the stone (Figure 2) also suggests that he marked the completion of his painting not with the eighth view, but with the tenth, engraving his subjectivity at that point. Looking at the stone, Mi Wanzhong writes, should stop with the tenth view.

Nevertheless, Zhang Nai’s writing should not be disregarded as it affords a springboard to understanding the seventeenth-century notion of seeing. In the latter half of his account, Zhang states that the rock he perceives is a view from his consciousness. What he sees is not the truth, he writes, just like a lamp that causes constant changes of light and shadow (Zhang Nai, 11:48a–b). Then he laments that one cannot see every possible view of Mount Lu—a famous literary trope from Su Shi’s (1037–1101) celebrated quatrain Written on the Xilin Temple Wall (Grant 1994, p. 1). Both the impossibility of seeing the true face of Mount Lu described in the poem and Zhang Nai’s phrase about a view from his consciousness allude to the same source. It is Buddhist epistemology expounded in the Śūraṅgama Sūtra, which Su Shi and later writers enjoyed citing (Grant 1994, p. 29), and which, by the late sixteenth century, had become the most widely read Buddhist text (Araki 1984, pp. 245–74). Along with its exceptional quality of literary composition, the meditative methods of taming sensory organs and the soteriological role of illusion introduced in the sutra fascinated late Ming intellectuals and artists (Lo 2016, pp. 107–51; Ryor 2019, pp. 244–66).

The well-educated scholar, Zhang Nai, would not miss this intellectual trend, and it is from the Śūraṅgama Sūtra that he borrowed the metaphor of the lamp. In the pertinent passage, the Buddha admonishes Ānanda for relying on external factors for seeing because immediate visual perception is not true seeing but an ever-transient lamplight (SLYJ, T 945.19:109b). A lamp, like the sun and the moon, refers to a source of light that conditions the visibility of perceivable objects. Ānanda defends himself by claiming that ordinary people see various objects by relying on the light from the sun, the moon, and lamps, and this is what they mean by “seeing” because without these sources of light, they would not be able to see (SLYJ, T 945.19:113a). Then, the Buddha begins his lecture on why he should employ the power of his vision to the fullest extent to see everything in the universe clearly without depending on a lamp and distinguish them from himself (SLYJ, T 945.19:111b).

The increasing awareness of such Buddhist epistemology flourished together with the mid-sixteenth-century revival of Yogācāra Buddhism, a Buddhist philosophy tradition that values the study of cognition, perception, and consciousness (Brewster 2018, pp. 117–70; Chu 2010, pp. 5–26; Struve 2019, pp. 99–103). Although the Śūraṅgama Sūtra, with its apocryphal origin, is not traditionally associated with Yogācāra Buddhism, late Ming commentators utilized Yogācāra doctrines to annotate the sutra, as well as other Mahāyāna texts. Accordingly, the storehouse consciousness (ālāyavijñāna), the critical element in Yogācārin metaphysics, and the Mahāyāna Buddhist idea of the embryo of Buddhahood (tathāgatagarbha), a primary exegesis in the Śūraṅgama Sūtra, arose as underpinning concepts in a wide range of Buddhist writings and practices in the late sixteenth century. Notably, the Four Eminent Monks of the Wanli period (1572–1620), Hanshan Deqing (1546–1623), Zibo Zhenke (1543–1603), Yunqi Zhuhong (1535–1615), and Ouyi Zhixu (1599–1655) had a mutual fascination with doctrines across different Buddhist schools, Yogācāra, and tathāgatagarbha, despite their individual distinctness and sectarian foundations in Chan or Pure Land (Chu 2010, p. 16).13

The pan-sectarian syncretism points to another important philosophical shift. The late Ming period marked a change in intellectual currents involving the discourses led by Yangming School of Mind scholars who emphasized the Mind (xin) in explaining the world. By the early seventeenth century, epistemological interest in the relation between seeing and knowing came to include questions about the metaphysical implications of investigating Things (wu). In reevaluating Things in the lower level of the hierarchy among beings, they noted that perceiving Things perceived as images can be manifestations of their Mind (Bian 2020, p. 78). Under such intellectual currents, some comparable concepts in late Ming Buddhism and Yangming Confucianism catalyzed inter-religious dynamics. As William Chu points out, the newly revived Yogācāra tradition paralleled the concept of consciousness with the Mind in tathāgatagarbha thought, which could be posited as the Mind in the Yangming Confucianist context (Chu 2010, pp. 6–8, 15–16). The emphasis on the physical world as a projection of the Mind was one on which Yangming Confucianists and syncretic-minded Buddhists could agree.

Obsessions with appreciating rocks came at the end of the sixteenth century when the ability to observe and characterize material objects began to serve as a precondition for understanding the physical world.14 The urge for in-depth visual experiences followed amateur interest in horticulture, medicine, mineralogy, and herbology. Empirical impulse had long been in Chinese intellectual spheres, but the late Ming thinkers pushed it further to question the nature of their reality consisting of a perceiving self and perceived things, either in the Confucian or Buddhist senses, or both. The Confucian scholar Luo Wenying (active early 17th century) wrote in a preface to a herbological text that when one sees things as Things, images, vegetal roots, or dim appearances, all these are nothing but the manifestations of his own Nature (xing) (Bian 2020, p. 75). This understanding of human perception resonates with the Buddhist view of the material world that every perceived object is the manifestation of the Mind, as mentioned earlier. The soteriological undertone, however, marks the difference between the two thoughts. In the Śūraṅgama Sūtra, the Buddha says one needs to carefully observe everything as much as possible to realize that all are objects of one’s perception (SLYJ, T 945.19:111b). Therein lies a challenge in which sentient beings cannot easily distinguish illusoriness because perceivable phenomena and reality constantly redefine one another. Hanshan Deqing, the eminent commentator of the Śūraṅgama Sūtra in the Yogācārin context, annotates this phrase that objects one sees here are just dust (chen) floating in the sensory fields (Hanshan Deqing, X 279.12:547c). They are visible because the storehouse consciousness, which is accumulated impressions and experiences from sense data, illuminates these clouds of dust. Realizing that what is visible is just motes of dust requires a meditative practice that may lead one to the ultimate reality beyond sensory perception.

1.2. Seeing as Worldmaking

As a devoted Buddhist praised by Hanshan Deqing (Hanshan Deqing, X 1456.73:736c), Wu Bin was also familiar with the Śūraṅgama Sūtra and the contemporary ethos on sense-perception shaped by Yogācārin phenomenology.15 Around 1600, Wu Bin created an album titled Twenty-five Dharma Gateways of Perfect Wisdom from the Śūraṅgama Sūtra. The album consists of twenty-five leaves, each depicting arhats, bodhisattvas, and a buddha, and two inscriptions written by Chen Jiru in 1620 and Dong Qichang in 1621.16 The twenty-five dharma gateways refer to meditative methods that concentrate on six sense objects, six sense organs, six consciousnesses, and seven elements to reach enlightenment (SLYJ, T 945.19:130a–131b). Among them, the gateway that resonates with what Wu Bin did with the Lingbi rock is Upaniṣad’s contemplation upon visible objects (sechen, literally meaning colorful dust) (Figure 3). This method alludes to a fifth-century early chan practice of visualizing a decaying body, famously known as “white bone contemplation” (Greene 2021, pp. 84–87).17 When presenting his method to reach enlightenment, Upaniṣad explains that he has gazed at bones until they turn to dust, disperse into space, and vanish. Visible objects as he had perceived them no longer exist, but “their wondrousness was revealed to him everywhere (SLYJ, T 945.19:125c).” Wu Bin’s visualization of Upaniṣad captures this meditative process that leads to enlightenment. In the painting, Upaniṣad calmly gazes down at a small skeleton expressing respect to him. The relationship between the see-er and the seen in Wu Bin’s painting is markedly different from one in another depiction of Upaniṣad made by Fu Kun (active 17th century) in 1627 (Lo 2016, pp. 140–42). In Fu Kun’s version, Upaniṣad gazes at scattered bones. The length of time Upaniṣad spent observing them is suggested by the grass growing through the skeleton’s eye sockets. While Fu Kun underscores the process of decaying, Wu Bin presents the “wondrousness” revealed upon Upaniṣad’s enlightenment—a living skeleton wearing a gauzy robe, whose initial form had been disappeared but remained visible to him.

As Mi Wanzhong indicated in his colophon to Ten Views of a Lingbi Rock, how Wu Bin chose to visually experience the stone was to “examine (guan)”. In the same piece of his writing, Mi also acknowledges that the true aspect of his rock can be grasped only by the Mind, a sentiment reminiscent of Su Shi’s reflections on Mount Lu. But Ten Views of a Lingbi Rock does not stop at acknowledging the limit of bodily perception. Whereas the eleventh-century poet internalized his inability of true seeing by gazing inward instead of projecting outward, Wu Bin and Mi Wanzhong challenge the limit by pushing the boundaries at full force. The scroll invites the onlookers to leap into the sensorium to materialize their optical experiences. When one reaches close to the level of seeing that which “transcends all external conditioning forces”, there will be the truth (Grant 1994, p. 30). The process of illusion built from an excessive seeing in Ten Views of a Lingbi Rock may demonstrate how one’s fixated gaze onto a single visible object works as a gateway. Consequently, the scroll exhausts all possible operations that involve the optic faculty—observing, painting, measuring, describing, and, to that end, presenting itself as a perpetuating enumeration of illusion and reality, or, in other words, visible things and truth beyond visibility. To that end, even after the physical rock disintegrates, its “wondrousness” would remain perceivable to enlightened minds.

The exploratory role of registering one’s optic faculty onto the stone and the painting scroll suggests that the implication of the number ten to illustrate the stone is not just about excessiveness. Visually, a diagram of a head from eleven different angles in the Pictorial Compendium of the Three Powers published in 1609 might have been a source of inspiration (Wang Qi, renshi 4:29a–30a). The diagram proceeds as “one-tenth view”, “two-tenth view”, and so forth and ends with the “rear view” following the “ten-tenth view (front view)”, a total of eleven views (Figure 4). Nevertheless, each picture in the table was to model a single piece of portraiture, not to unpack all eleven of them onto a handscroll. The Buddhist numerical implication about the number ten may explain why Wu Bin chose to present ten views. The metaphor of the number ten harks back to the Mahāyāna idea of the “ten suchlike aspects of reality (ten tathāta; shi rushi)” elaborated in the Lotus Sūtra (Miaofa lianhuajing, T 262.9:5c), which inspired the Tiantai concept of ten realms of reality (ten dharmadhātu; shi fajie) (Mohe zhiguan, T 1911.46:5b).18 The cosmological overtone of the number ten is incorporated with the epistemological context in the Śūraṅgama Sūtra. The sutra teaches that those free from impediments caused by sense organs, faculties, consciousnesses, and material elements will see everything from ten directions with penetrating accuracy and clarity (SLYJ, T 945.19:109b–119b). More specifically, ten directions account for the four cardinal directions, their four intermediate directions, the top, and the bottom. Wu Bin followed the first eight directions but chose two sides of the bottom instead of one seen from the top. Such a decision was perhaps to overcome the limitations of the eye faculty. In Buddhist epistemology, especially that illustrated in the Śūraṅgama Sūtra, the eye faculty is incomplete because it fails to perceive two corners of the subject’s back (SLYJ, T 945.19:122c). When a rock stands as a perceived object, its bottom is inconceivable in plain sight. The clear-cut, flat bottom also suggests that the depicted rock was initially the topmost part of a bigger piece of rock, consisting of multiple peaks, thus the rarest. To capture the rare piece of rock from angles that no one else can easily see, Wu Bin dared to remove it from the pedestal, flipped, observed, painted, and even inscribed his signature—“Wu Bin writes (Wu Bin xie)”—as if it were permanently engraved on a deep, dark cavity at the bottom of the stone (Figure 2).19 In this unassuming signature, Wu Bin registers his capacity to see this object comprehensively. Through this signature in the tenth view, the metaphoric number ten further underscores the potential to see the true nature of all existence and manifestations.

Wu Bin’s contemporaries did not regard the seeming bizarreness in his paintings as a mere reflection of the painter’s eccentric personality or meaningless imagination. Instead, they appreciated it as the materialization of the transcendental vision of the awakened one. The eminent scholar-official Gu Qiyuan (1565–1628) probes the complex process of truth-making illusion caused by the collision between the object and the Mind, in the colophon he wrote after Wu Bin’s Five Hundred Arhats, consecrated in the Qixia Temple, Nanjing.20 This colophon was written in response to Wu Bin’s request to record what he dreamed before creating the painting. Although extremely lengthy, part of Gu Qiyuan’s colophon is worth discussing here:

A monk named Wujie from Sichuan came to see the master [Wu Bin], soliciting paintings of the Five Hundred Arhats from Wu Bin, to have it as a dharma treasure at Mount Ming [in Sichuan]. As Wu Bin silently rejected [the request] at that moment, the monk wrote a gāthā and left. After ten days, Wu Bin fell asleep and had a sudden dream, in which the monk leads the crowd to venerate the Buddha. When Wu Bin also joined the prayer, there was a thunderous sound and earthquake. Strange creatures with wings were brimming in the sky, with the monk staring down from the platform, the Vajra guardian, and Vināyaka. Everyone revealed different forms with bizarre garments. When Wu Bin panicked and wanted to run away, there was a loud sound saying: “You cannot return until you fully depict our appearances.” Then Wu Bin asked for a brush and painted them. Suddenly there was a troop [of guardians] with blades as if they were trying to cut Wu Bin’s hair. Wu Bin woke up and painted the Five Hundred Arhats from his heart. Because these paintings are from what he saw in his dream, there are winged guardians. …Wu Bin believes all phenomena arise from the mind, [all causes] start from the dream; nevertheless, one cannot verify or refer to the past dreams. [Thus] He asked me to record it.

One hears this story and may doubt that it is all fiction. Then I say it is not. In this dream, there are six afflictions and four conditions. In essence, [the dream] returns to the perception, and there is a cause [of all phenomena]. [When one wants to] follow cognitive faculties and their sense objects and runs like a disordered wheel, then [he/she would] waste breath because of habituated tendencies concealed in the repository. The perception changes incessantly; what really follows is the only enlightened mind.

Today, people do not comprehend the essence of consciousness. They follow the false reputation of being awakened from the dream. …There is a dream because of a dream; a dream is called a dream because there is an awakening. What is manifest in the dream is the shadow of the awakened status. What you ponder during the awakened status is the cognitive object in the dream. …Water essentially becomes salty as it flows into the sea, so do sense objects when they come into the Mind. How can we ordinary beings know that Wenzhong’s dream bears fruits as illusory objects, and the painting by Wenzhong is real? The real is not the real; the illusion is not an illusion. Thus, no matter the material appearance on paper is exquisitely painted, I am afraid it is so muted that it is difficult to discern. …It is because Wenzhong has long planted good seeds and stored them in depth [of his consciousness] as pure perception. Thus, he can truly investigate the realm of the numinous, in quiet acquiescence with the sage lineage of patriarchs, and also assisted by [the actions in] his past lives, he finally reaps a good fruit (Gu Qiyuan, “Record of the Painting of Dreaming Five Hundred Arhats”, in Ge Yinliang 1607, 4:23b–25b).

As far as Gu Qiyuan is concerned, Wu Bin’s ability to see and to paint is not simply extraordinary. It is a pure or even enlightened form of a perception that emerges from seeds accumulated in the past and present and deposited in the storehouse of his consciousness (Lusthaus 2002, pp. 512–13). When these seeds bear fruit in the form of experience in the next life, they divide the world into phenomena and the physical body; the distinction between the two is an illusion. In this context, the painter’s act of distinguishing the perceiving subject and the perceived object through excessive looking may engender illusion. The Śūraṅgama Sūtra likens this process to staring at objects until the eyes become so tired that they see flowers in the sky. The significance lies in the attempt to push one’s sense faculty to the extreme until it creates an illusion and, to that end, a clearly perceivable material world.21 When one realizes the nature of illusion as reflections of our experiences, behaviors, cognitions, and desires deposited in storehouse consciousness, the perception of ultimate reality occurs. As Lynn Struve suggests, in the late Ming, the soteriological program of dream visions was no longer limited to eminent monks but considered attainable by ordinary minds (Struve 2019, p. 101). Gu Qiyuan believed Wu Bin had grasped this process of enlightenment and obtained a transcendental vision, which could envisage the world indiscernible to eyes of others.

Regarding the interfusion of otherworldly spectacles and what one may call realism in Wu Bin’s paintings, James Cahill proposed a possible influence from the newly imported European pictures (Cahill 1982, pp. 70–94). Chinese viewers, Cahill claimed, considered illusionistic engravings from the West as super-real images of unverifiable visions because they “had no way of knowing where visual reporting ended and fantasy began (Cahill 1982, p. 98).” Cahill’s pitch is certainly appealing when we limit the meaning of illusion—“fantasy” in Cahill’s word—within pictorial illusionism as generated by mimetic representational methods. In fact, Wu Bin’s possible exposure to European artworks is only circumstantial because many works by Wu Bin precede the circulation of the Jesuit illustrated books, such as Jerome Nadal’s (1507–1580) Evangelicae Historiae Imagines.22 Nadal’s illustrated gospel entered China around 1606 and was translated into Chinese by the Jesuit missionary Giulio Aleni (1582–1649) in 1637. Nevertheless, one cannot deny that Wu Bin’s residence in Nanjing briefly overlapped with the Jesuits arrival to the southern capital of the Ming dynasty. What should be noted here is not the potential European “impact” on seventeenth-century Chinese painting but the religio-philosophical discourses on perception that shaped the intellectual landscape proximate to the painter and his audiences. Nanjing and other cultural centers of China in the dawn of the seventeenth century were perhaps the rendezvous of the two emerging interests in embodying optical experiences, which can be further explored in later studies from a comparative perspective.

2. Conclusions

Once Ten Views of a Lingbi Rock became a spectacle, the scroll was exhibited nationwide in the two capitals—Beijing and Nanjing, travelling all the way to the southernmost Fujian province in the following five years. Some of the colophon writers saw the stone; for others, the painting substituted for the presence of the stone. Regardless of whether they saw the stone in person or not, all writers confirmed the presence of the tridimensional stone once they optically experienced the bidimensional representation. Such an effect of make-believe would be possible because Ten Views of a Lingbi Rock, as an image, has the capacity to appear to the viewers as if it came into being without their effort by virtue of its ontological autonomy (Morgan 2018, p. 63).23 These temporally and spatially diverse acts of looking and beliefs in the existence of the rock came to be accumulated and assembled on the flat surface of an art object.24 In this way, the Lingbi stone exists in the interrelated sensory spheres experienced by different ocular faculties. Within this shared world, even when the vision of one of the onlookers ceases through death, the presence of the stone would remain in the minds of those living. Mi Wanzhong writes at the end of his inscription to the tenth view, “Since we have portrayed the ten views, the act of looking must stop here, but the mind will perpetuate to cease only at infinity.”

The late Ming collecting culture reflects the practices of self-fashioning through consumerism and materialism, as many scholars have already discussed.25 What has not been noted in this context is that the collectible rocks and paintings or catalogues of them were not merely commodities as objects of aesthetic pleasure. The appreciation of collectibles, “wanshang”, literally meaning playing and appreciating, elicited playing with scale, numbers, various sensory experiences, and even ontological questions. Meticulous documentation of intensive optical experiences constructed the authenticity of the perceived things, which could be a version of personal reality. The quasi-realistic depiction of the rock that Wu Bin achieved, I suggest, cannot simply be reduced to pictorial illusionism. Ten Views of Lingbi Rock triggers an impulse to see beyond “what is nonetheless already there” (Barthes 1981, p. 55).

Ten Views of a Lingbi Rock attests to seventeenth-century perceptual engagement that brought an art object into being. Sensory experiences—particularly optical ones—and questions about the reality of perceivable things were involved in this process of making Ten Views of a Lingbi Rock a work of art in presence. Creators and beholders of the object sought answers from Buddhist epistemological ideas, as this paper probed. One may ask, then, if Ten Views of a Lingbi Rock is a “Buddhist” painting? As Raoul Brinbaum points out, through visual media, seventeenth-century elites with strong Buddhist commitments would articulate concerns directly important to them from Buddhist perspectives (Birnbaum 2016, p. 94). Wu Bin’s social status as a professional painter did not deter him from becoming a scholarly lay Buddhist. Lavishing support from his major patrons, ever-growing lay Buddhist communities, and the proliferation of publications in the late Ming might have provided him with intellectual resources to join the conversation using his own painterly language.