Raigō

What raigō means

Raigō is the descent of Amida Nyorai from the Western Pure Land, accompanied by the bodhisattvas Kannon and Seishi and a host of other heavenly beings, to receive a believer who has recited his name at the moment of death. The scene is described in the Contemplation Sutra, one of the core texts of Pure Land Buddhism, and with the spread of Pure Land Buddhism from the Heian period it became one of the main subjects of Japanese Buddhist painting and sculpture.

Paintings of the scene are called raigō-zu, raigō pictures. The Tokyo National Museum notes that an earlier type showing Amida preaching in his paradise came first, and that images of him arriving with an escort of bodhisattvas became widespread from around the mid-Heian period. By the late Heian and the Kamakura period painters were adding the dying person's house, the surrounding hills and the flowers of the seasons, a sign that the belief had entered everyday life.

Several compositions developed. One shows Amida and his retinue large and facing the viewer. Another, common in the Kamakura period, sends the procession diagonally down the picture from the upper left toward the believer below. The Agency for Cultural Affairs names the painting of Amida and the twenty-five bodhisattvas at Chionin, known as the Swift Descent, as the leading example of this diagonal type. A simpler raigō triad shows only Amida, Kannon and Seishi, and such paintings were hung at the bedside of the dying.

How to read raigō images and records

Each figure in the procession has a role. Kannon holds out the lotus pedestal on which the dying person will be carried, and Seishi presses his palms together. Most of the other bodhisattvas play instruments, among them drums, lutes and flutes, and children carrying banners lead the way. Amida is usually painted standing, with the right hand raised and the left lowered, the thumb and index finger of each hand touching in the welcoming gesture.

Direction follows a convention. Old Japanese painting generally treats the viewer's left as west, so the procession enters from that side, while the believer's house sits at the lower right. In some works a thin beam of light runs from Amida to the eaves of the house.

Designation titles carry the word within the name of the subject, preceded by a phrase describing who makes up the procession: the twenty-five bodhisattvas, the holy host, or the triad. The words that open many such titles, kenpon chakushoku, mean colours on silk and record the technique rather than the subject.

A separate architectural term needs to be kept apart. The pair of pillars standing behind the altar platform in the inner sanctuary of a Buddhist hall is called Raigō-bashira. That is the name of a structural member, not of the iconographic scene, and a building entry that mentions raigō should be read with care to see whether the pillars are meant.