Shilian Dashan's Self-Portraits (1/33)

Shilian Dashan's 33 Self-Portraits

I'm hoping to teach students in my course about Shilian Dashan, who rose from selling paintings on the street to master of an empire of Chan monasteries with powerful allies and mission contacts in Guangdong, Macao, Vietnam and Japan. His 30-year career, 1770s-1800s, ended when he was tried for a long list of crimes including smuggling, theft and anti-government stuff.

Shilian wrote a long memoir of his big trip to Vietnam, but Professor Wu Pei-yi seems more interested in the 36 self-portraits included in the monk's collected poetry volumes. I was excited to find copies of these portraits in two different modern editions, but I can't make out the text in the corners of these -- I'll be trying to though, and asking my classmates for help on this.



Dispatching the Demon 遣魔圖
Wu Pei-yi, The Confucian's Progress, p. 200