Yakushi Nyorai

Who Yakushi Nyorai is

Yakushi Nyorai is the Buddha of healing, lord of an eastern paradise, shown most often holding a medicine jar in the left hand.

He is usually enshrined as a triad with the bodhisattvas of sunlight and moonlight. Daigoji in Kyoto holds a wooden Yakushi with two attendants kept in its Yakushi hall, three figures of the Heian period, designated an Important Cultural Property in 1902 and a National Treasure in 1953. The phrase naming the two attendants signals the triad form.

The Yakushiji figures appear in a record about Kannon Bosatsu. The description of a replica of the standing Sho-Kannon from the east hall at Yakushiji notes that the bronze original is thought, from its casting technique and metal, to date from the same time as the Yakushi triad in the temple's main hall.

The name attaches to halls and small shrines too. The Takigawa Residence Hokora in Aichi Prefecture is said to enshrine the Yakushi of Horaiji, and the entry calls it indispensable to the estate.

Reading the record

Records distinguish the image from the hall that houses it. The Daigoji entry adds where the figures are kept, and sculpture is counted apart from architecture, with an Insū given in figures rather than structures.

A Yakushi hall is a building whose principal image is this Buddha, recorded separately as a structure. When writing, be clear whether the record cited is for the sculpture or for the hall.

The medicine jar in the left hand is the usual mark, but it is sometimes lost, and the name in the record is the reliable guide.