immediately following that of the competition. Mani sets offto China to
proselytize. When the Chinese learn of this, they quickly
Set a trap for him, placing a pond [made] out of crystal in his way. Artists had
painted waves on its glass surface, making it look like rows of waves rolling to the
shore on the surface of the pond. And around the pond they placed green grass that
looked as though it grew around the pond.
When Mani came by, he was very thirsty, hurried to the pond, and took out his
jug tofill it. But as soon as his jug touched the rock-hard pond it broke since it was
made out of clay.
Mani understood that the Chinese wanted to give him misfortune with this
pond. So he took a feather and began to paint using all the rules of art on the pond
to fool the one who had fooled a Mani. With the malleable brush he painted a dead
dog on the glassy surface, the carrion of which was being eaten by an army of
worms, so that anybody who saw the dead dog in the pond would never want to
quench his thirst there.
As the patrons in China learned of the warning Mani had left on the water, the
people tended to be spellbound by his magic and tended towards him and his
“Artang”book.^36
Mani’s transition from heretic to hero hinges on his deceptive image
protecting the innocent by thwarting earlier duplicity. The image is parti-
cularly repellent for Muslims, who conceive of dogs as unclean in the
context of prayer (although working dogs have long been common). His
painting reverts the gaze to truth by undermining deceitful representation.
Popular literature often repeated such warnings, as in this the fable related
by Aesop:“A pigeon had grown very thirsty, so sheflew from place to place
looking for some water to drink. She saw a water jar painted on a wall and
thought that it was actually full of water, so sheflew right into the wall in
order to take a drink.”^37 A similar story describes painting in the Brethren
of Purity’s discussion of craft:
Painters...do nothing more than imitate existent forms, be they natural, artificial,
or of the soul, yet their skill is enough to draw the viewer’s eyes to [the depiction]
and away from the existent thing itself due tota’ajjub[amazement] regarding its
beauty and brilliant appearance. It also happens that the difference between
artisans can be quite large. It has been said that a man from one place or another
used to paint images and likenesses (suwar wa tamathil) in bright pigments and
beautiful, luminous colours, and that viewers who saw them experiencedta’ajjub
[wonder], due to the [image’s] beauty and brilliance. But there was deficiency in his
work such that a skilled and talented artist passed by, stopped to closely scrutinize
(^36) Nizami, 1991 : 291–292. (^37) Brecoulaki, 2015 : 218 (Fable 434).
Nizami, the Paintings of Mani, and the Mirrors of Suhrawardi 145