Abstract: The fictitious Scare Animal (beasts that can ward off evil) was made up in the Southern and Northern Dynasties, an era of various mixing and coexisting religious beliefs. These beliefs all adopted the images of the Scare Animal, leading to divergent opinions in current textual research. Not limited to previous literature records, this paper investigates the image meaning of the Scare Animal from the perspective of the engravers’ or the painters’ “creation scheme”. The uniqueness of the images of the Scare Animal lies in the inherent stability of their composition, which requires fixed techniques and patterns for works of different genres. For the engravers and the painters, these techniques and patterns are not symbolic.

Key words: image of the Scare Animal; creation scheme; image composition; stability