Zōng Bǐng 宗炳 (375–443), zì Shàowén 少文, of Nièyáng 涅陽 in Nányáng 南陽 (modern Hénán). LiúSòng painter, lay-Buddhist apologist, qín-master, and one of the great recluse-figures of the Eastern-Jìn / LiúSòng transition. CBDB id 480312 records him under LiúSòng (dynasty code 15) without lifedates; the standard Sòng shū 93 (Yǐnyì zhuàn) and Nán shǐ 75 biographies give the conventional dates 375–443, followed here.
Refused all official summons throughout his life, despite repeated invitations from Liú Yù 劉裕 (later Sòng Wǔdì), Liú Yìlóng 劉義隆 (Sòng Wéndì), and Sòng Wǔdì’s chancellor Wáng Hóng 王弘. Spent his early adulthood in extensive travel through the southern mountains — Lúshān 廬山 (where he was a lay disciple of the Buddhist patriarch Huìyuǎn 慧遠 of Dōnglínsì 東林寺), Héngshān 衡山, the Jīng 荊 and Wū 巫 mountain ranges — and his middle years collecting and painting landscapes. In old age, infirm and unable to travel, he is said in Sòng shū to have hung his paintings of mountains and waters on the walls of his retreat at Jiānglíng so that he might “lie back and roam in them” (wò yóu 臥遊) — the canonical anecdote that gave Chinese landscape-painting its founding programmatic statement.
Author of KR3h0095 Huà shānshuǐ xù 畫山水序 (Preface on the Painting of Landscapes), the earliest extant Chinese theoretical text on landscape painting and one of the foundational documents of East-Asian art theory; and the Míngfó lùn 明佛論 (“Discourse Clarifying the Buddha”), an important early-Buddhist apologetic preserved in the Hóngmíng jí 弘明集 (T2102). The Suí shū · Jīngjí zhì lists his collected works in 16 juàn (lost as a unit). His son Zōng Què 宗愨 (the famous LiúSòng general who said “I wish to ride the long wind and break the ten-thousand-lǐ waves”) and his nephew Zōng Cè 宗測 are also recorded in Sòng shū. Wilkinson §27.4 notes Zōng Bǐng as one of the principal LiúSòng lay-Buddhist intellectuals.