Washing the Elephant

A later painting of the subject, 1575-1600, unknown painter.

Washing the Elephant is a Yuan or Song Dynasty ink on silk hanging scroll attributed to Li Gonglin. The painting depicts the common scene of Manjushri cleaning the elephant. The painting depicts 8 foreign grooms, 2 foreign observers, four monks, and two Chinese attired in loose robes. The heavy labor is left to foreign grooms. It is in the collection of the Indiana University Art Museum.

Ding Yunpeng, c. 1588

There is little literary evidence for the origins of the elephant tale, but researchers speculate a connection with one of the stories of the Nirvana Sutra. The story is the blind man who feels an elephant (Chinese: 盲人摸象; Jyutping: mang2ren2mo1xiang4)—the elephant in this tale symbolizes the "Buddha nature". A group of blind men reach touch a different part of the elephant—one feels the tusk and thinks it is a carrot, another mistakes the elephant's belly for an urn, and so on. The king seeks that Shakyamuni illuminate their limited perception (symbolized by blindness in the parable) that permits only partial truths.

The earliest record of this theme in art dates from the 6th century. Tang Dynasty paintings of the same theme have a traditional colour scheme of red and white with some green. A Ming Dynasty painting of the same scene by Chen Hongshou in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art has an inscription to support that Ming intellectuals considered this scene to represent "sweeping away illusion".

The silk painting attributed to Li Gonglin was at one time in the collection of Xiang Yuanbian (1525-1590), and this and other works were scattered as a result of subsequent military invasions, with some passing into the hands of other collectors.