Ink Painting on Paper with Light Color Depicting Ekadanbi

Huike Offering His Severed Arm: Sesshū's Boldest Painting

A monk kneels and holds out his own severed forearm. The master he offers it to keeps his back turned, facing a wall of rock, refusing to look. Sesshū Tōyō chose this exact instant for one of the largest figure paintings in Japanese ink art, signed in 1496 when he was 77 years old.

The work is called Eka Danpi-zu, "Huike Severing His Arm." Its full designated title notes that it carries an inscription stating the painter's age. Among the six works by Sesshū registered as National Treasures, five are landscapes. This is the one that is not.

The Legend on the Paper

The scene comes from the founding story of Chan, the school of Buddhism that reached Japan as Zen. Bodhidharma, known in Japan as Daruma, had come from India and was meditating in a cave at Shaolin Temple on Mount Song in China. He sat facing the rock for nine years.

A monk named Shenguang (Jinkō in Japanese) came asking to become his student. Bodhidharma ignored him. According to the tradition, on a winter day Shenguang cut off his own left arm and presented it to prove the seriousness of his resolve. Only then was he accepted. He took the name Huike and became the second patriarch of the lineage, the man through whom the teaching passed on.

Sesshū does not soften any of it. The pale, freshly cut forearm is shown plainly, an image with no real precedent in earlier painting. A touch of red marks the wound and the monk's clenched mouth, so that the pain registers even before the viewer knows the story.

Why It Became a National Treasure

Sesshū (1420–1502 or 1506) is one of the central figures of Japanese painting, and his reputation rests mainly on landscape. The other five National Treasures attributed to him are all landscapes, including the great handscroll held in Yamaguchi and the Ama-no-Hashidate view in Kyoto. Figure paintings by his hand are far fewer. This one was designated a National Treasure on June 8, 2004, having already been recognized as a protected property since the early twentieth century.

Two things set it apart. The first is sheer scale. The painting measures roughly 183.8 by 112.8 centimeters, and the figures are close to life size, which is rare for a Zen patriarch subject. The largest single sheet of paper joined into the work reaches about 102 by 46 centimeters, large enough that the paper was very likely imported from China rather than made locally.

The second is what Sesshū did with a Chinese model. He had traveled to Ming China and studied its painting, and the composition is thought to draw on a Chinese handscroll of Bodhidharma and the patriarchs. A closely related Ming painting of the same scene survives in China. Yet the boldness of the design and the cold restraint of the color make Sesshū's version stand on its own.

What to Look At

Stand in front of the painting and the geometry takes over. The ground is a single severe horizontal line. Bodhidharma and Huike face each other in strict profile as two similar silhouettes, one seated and absorbed, the other leaning in. Around roughly three-quarters of the picture, the cave wall rises in dense, textured brushwork built from the Chinese cun method of modeling rock.

Bodhidharma's robe is laid down in a few broad strokes of pale ink, so his body seems to dissolve into the dark of the cave while his face, in heavy black ink, holds the eye. Look for the holes pierced through the rock, a motif Sesshū returned to often. The cool, thin washes of color do not decorate the scene so much as chill it, which is the point: this is a picture about a decision made in the dead of winter.

Where to See It

The original is on long-term deposit at the Kyoto National Museum and is not on permanent display. Because it is a fragile National Treasure, it appears only occasionally, usually in special exhibitions, sometimes shown alongside other works by Sesshū. Anyone hoping to see the real painting should check the museum's exhibition schedule before traveling.

The owner of the painting is Sainen-ji, a Sōtō Zen temple in the Ōno district of Tokoname City in Aichi Prefecture. The temple was the family temple of the Saji clan, lords of nearby Ōno Castle, and it was the warrior Saji Tamesada who donated the painting to Sainen-ji in 1532, some decades after Sesshū's death. The temple now displays a full-size reproduction panel, so a visit explains how the work came to a small port town far from Kyoto, even though the original is elsewhere.

Around Tokoname and Kyoto

Tokoname is one of Japan's oldest pottery towns, and its Pottery Footpath winds past old kilns, brick chimneys, and walls studded with ceramic pipes. The town is also the maker of countless maneki-neko, the beckoning cat figures. Central Japan International Airport sits within Tokoname, which makes the area an easy first or last stop for many international travelers arriving in the Nagoya region.

For the painting itself, the trip is to Kyoto. The Kyoto National Museum stands in the Higashiyama district near the Sanjūsangen-dō hall and within reach of the temples of southeastern Kyoto, so a visit timed to an exhibition can sit comfortably inside a wider day of sightseeing.