Anonymous (Qing dynasty)


A Water and Land Ritual Assembly, Shuilu ZhaiInk and color on silk, framed and glazed, the Bodhisattva Dabancaitian, here likely the multi-armed female deity in the lower right corner, accompanied by other Guardian Kings, Bodhisattvas and additional heavenly deities, all dressed in elaborate attire and carrying identifying iconography, arranged in three rows of three surrounded by whorls of gray smoke, the red vertical cartouche in the upper right hand corner reading Dabancaitian bing Tianxian. 56 1/2 x 31in (143.5 x 78.7cm) sight
|ProvenanceBy repute, a Southern California Collection since the 1960s and 1970s, possibly originally purchased in Paris.The prototype of Dabiancaitian 大辯才天, or Dabancaitian 大辦才天 as inscribed here, was the Indian Goddess Sarasvati. Sarasvati is the Goddess of water, music (hence her later and much more popular Japanese incarnation Benzaiten's ubiquitous biwa lute), wealth (translated as ban cai 辦[財]), or skillful speech (translated as bian cai 辯才, conveniently often typographically similar to ban cai)-- basically things that flow. In the present lot, the figure preserves the prototype deity's white color, book, and multiple limbs.It is unsurprising that a relatively obscure deity would be identified so specifically and included in a Water Land Rite painting of this kind. As Patricia Berger notes in her The Latter Days of the Law: Image of Chinese Buddhism 850-1850 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 1994), 95, 'An essential component of the rite was an elaborate suite of images, representing all the classes of beings in the Chinese universe.' Thus as a taxonomy of every corner of the Chinese religious pantheon, Water Ritual works are often a wonderful resource to enjoy less-commonly depicted gods-- see a depiction of Yamantaka in some ways similar to some of the Tianxian accompanying Dabancaitian here, sold in these rooms as lot 6437 in sale 24263 on 28 June 2017.佚名 （清） 水陸齋 設色絹本 鏡框題字：大辦才天并天仙來源：美國南加州私人收藏，據聞於1960或1970年代購自法國巴黎