Shên Kua

“ WHEN painters paint Buddha’s aureole, they make it flat and round like a fan. If his body is deflected, then the aureole is also deflected,―a serious blunder. Such a one is only thinking of Buddha as a graven image, and does not know that the roundness of his aureole is everlasting. ”

“ In like manner, when Buddha is represented as walking, his aureole is made to tail out behind him, and this is called the wind-borne aureole,―also a serious blunder. For Buddha’s aureole is a divine aureole which even a universe-wrecking hurricane could not move, still less could our light breezes flutter it. ”

“ Now a horse is never seen in a painting to be more than a foot in size, which is a great proportionate reduction, and therefore the hair would be far too fine to be reproduced; whereas a rat generally has about the same measurement as in real life, and therefore the hair ought to be painted. ”