When I was very young, I heard a legend about a Chinese muralist
who painted the most vivid and lifelike dragons but refused to
fill in their eyes, lest the dragons come alive and fly away. I
tried to track it down four or five years ago for a fragment I
was writing at the time, but on that occasion I never found it.
Today it occurred to me to make another attempt, and for reasons
of n-grammatic potentia that shall remain mysterious, Google was
far more helpful this time around. As with any old story,
mutations abound, but the preponderance of them involve the
painter Zhang Seng-You (張僧繇) from the period of the Southern and
Northern Dynasties (420-589 AD). Depending on who’s telling the
story, Zhang Seng-You is asked to fill in the eyes by a
bystander, the abbot who commissioned the monastery mural, or
the Emperor himself (who, in this case, must have been Emperor
Wu of the Liang Dynasty). The ending is always the same: the
painter finishes the eyes and the dragons bolt away from the
mural in a flash of light