DAI BENXIAO / 戴本晓 (1621–1693)
Tiantai Shan /天台山 (1,138m- 3,784ft)
Cbina (Zhejiang)
In The Strange Pines of Mount Tiantai, 1687, Hanging scroll, ink on paper, The MET
In the collection of Marie-Hélène and Guy A. Weill until 1991.
A refuge since its discovery in the fourth century, Mount Tiantai is a legendary dwelling place of Buddhist holy men; its natural stone bridge is a fabled point of connection between this world and the paradise of the immortals. Dai Benxiao, whose Ming-loyalist father committed suicide after being injured in a battle against Qing forces, focuses here on the mountain's pines. Symbolic of survival in times of adversity, the pines, having been suddenly threatened, reflect the artist's uncertainty about his ability to find spiritual sanctuary in a world from which he feels alienated : " The strangely shaped pine trees of Mount Tiantai have been depicted by artists of previous periods. I have decided to portray this theme, drawing upon my own imagination. I have heard recently that most of these strange pines have met the sad fate of extinction. It seems that once the natural wonders of the sky, earth, mountains, and rivers are exposed to the intimate scrutiny of the dusty world, they do not last long. This is indeed cause for lamentation."
The mountain
Tiantai Shan / 天台山 (1138m- 3784ft) which means “Heavenly Terrace” also called Mount Tiantai is a mountain in Tiantai County near the city of Taizhou, Zhejiang, China. The mountain comprises a series of peaks - Tongbai, Foulong, Chicheng, whose the highest is Huading.
From a very early period the Tiantai mountain chain was considered holy, and in ancient times it was associated with Daoism. Many well-known Daoist adepts and masters lived there until the 11th and 12th centuries. Its fame, however, is associated not with Daoism but with Buddhism. According to tradition, the first Buddhist community was founded there in 238-251, but the renown of Tiantai began when the monk Zhiyi settled there in 576. When the Sui dynasty (581–618) unified China in 589, Zhiyi played an important role in giving religious sanction to the new regime and was greatly honoured by the Sui emperor. After Zhiyi’s death in 597, his disciples, under imperial patronage, made Tiantai a major cult centre. The best-known temples established there were the Guoqing, Dazi, Dianfeng, Huoguo, Wannian Bo’er, and Gaoming. Eventually there were 72 major temples as well as a great number of cloisters and shrines on the mountain, and it became a major centre of pilgrimage for both Chinese and Japanese Buddhists. It also gave its name to one of the major schools of Buddhist teaching, Tiantai, perhaps better known under its Japanese name of Tendai.
Many of the temples still remain, although the influence of the Tiantai school in Chinese Buddhism did not survive the 13th century. A good deal of building continued in the 17th and 18th centuries, and in the 17th century in particular the Tiantai area produced a number of prominent Buddhist scholars.
The mountain was made a national park on 1 August 1988.
The painter
Dai Benxiao / 戴本晓 (1621- 1693) was a landscapes painter of the Qing dynasty. His father, Dai Zhong (1602–46), a late Ming-dynasty (1368–1644) loyalist, moved his family to Nanjing in 1632. Political unrest forced them to move in 1637 and several times thereafter, always poor and often hungry. In 1645, having heard of the Manchu conquest of Nanjing, Dai Zhong helped organize resistance to the invading army but was later wounded in battle. Dai Benxiao was able to take his father back to Hezhou, but he died the following year. Thirty years later, Dai Benxiao built a commemorative shrine to his father and to Huilan, a Chan Buddhist martyr of the Southern Song period.
Dai Benxiao was a second-ranking painter of the Anhui school. Like Hong ren, he liked to endow his works with a monumental aspect with great economy of means. He was particularly gifted in the use of the dry brush and blurred wash painting for depicting distances. He seems to have been influenced by the fantastic landscapes dating from the end of the Ming dynasty.