Lions at the Stone Bridge of Mount Tiantai
| Support Type: | Silk |
| Paint Type: | Ink |
| Current Location: | The Metropolitan Museum of Art |
| Location History: | The hanging scroll was acquired by the Mary Griggs Burke Collection and entered the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2015 as a gift from the Mary and Jackson Burke Foundation. It is now preserved in the museum’s Asian Art Department in New York. |
Soga Shhaku's "Lions at the Stone Bridge of Mount Tiantai," a strange story becomes a meditation on perseverance, practicing, and the struggle to master a craft. The work shows a lioness throwing her cubs off of the famous stone bridge of Mount Tiantai, to see which ones can survive and will come back to her. The story has often been compared, according to the Met, to an artist or teacher judging the students. Furthermore, the fantastic scenery reinforces the message. The brothers' tiny figures against the grand cliffs, the churning clouds and the stilfailing bridge make them look insignificant before a power greater than themselves. Yet, their mother's unforgiving cruelty is not in vain; instead, it provides a grueling test on the chance of their shining through. The lesson of this picture might be that for growth to occur, one doesn't need to be protected from difficulty, but rather must go through it. Since the mountain is revered as an intersection of heaven and earth in both Chinese and Japanese traditions, the challenge is biblical in scale. Shhaku thus elevates the quirky occurrence into a metaphor for change - people are more apt to realize their potential not by sidestepping the edge but by summoning the power to climb up from it.