Five Great Buddha Statues Colored on Silk

Five Wrathful Kings, Painted for a Thousand-Year Rite

Every January, for seven days, senior priests of the Shingon school gather at Tō-ji in southern Kyoto to pray for the wellbeing of the sovereign and the safety of the country. The ceremony is the Goshichinichi mishihō, the Latter Seven-Day Rite, which Kūkai first conducted in 835. The five silk paintings known together as the Godai-son zō were made to hang on the walls of the hall where this rite was performed, and they have belonged to Tō-ji, officially Kyōō-gokoku-ji, ever since.

Each scroll depicts one of the Five Great Wisdom Kings, the Godai Myōō: Fudō at the center, with Gōzanze, Gundari, Daiitoku, and Kongō-yasha arranged to the four directions around him. In esoteric Buddhism these fierce, multi-limbed figures are not demons but emanations of the cosmic Buddha Dainichi, who take a wrathful form to subdue obstacles and defend the teaching. Texts such as the Ninnō-kyō, the Sutra of Benevolent Kings, place them at the five points of a protective scheme for the realm.

The set is the work of a court painter of the late Heian period. The bodies are softly modeled, the faces almost boyish in their calm, a gentleness that sits oddly with the snarls and weapons and reads as unmistakably twelfth-century.

Why It Is a National Treasure

Japan recognized the paintings as a National Treasure on 29 March 1952. The grounds are partly a matter of survival. Among complete five-scroll sets of the Five Great Wisdom Kings that predate the Kamakura period, only three remain: this Tō-ji set, the set at Daigo-ji, and the set at Raibu-ji in Gifu. The Tō-ji and Daigo-ji paintings follow the iconography of the Tō-ji Shingon lineage, while the Raibu-ji version preserves a separate Tendai tradition. To have any of them is rare; to have a complete five at Tō-ji, the temple at the heart of that tradition, is rarer still.

Their value also lies in continuity. The companion Twelve Devas that hung in the same ritual hall carry a date of 1127 and were produced under the patronage of Retired Emperor Toba, and the Godai-son zō is generally placed in the same circle of late-Heian court commissions, though no inscription on the paintings themselves fixes the year. What matters is that the rite they served has never truly stopped. Interrupted during the wars of the sixteenth century and again in 1871, it was revived in 1883 and is still held each January at Tō-ji. Few paintings of this age remain so closely tied to a living ceremony.

Reading the Five Scrolls

Each king can be told apart by how many faces, arms, and legs the painter gave him, and by what he holds or stands upon. The differences are precise, and worth slowing down for when the scrolls are on view.

Fudō, the immovable one at the center, is the plainest in form: a single face and two arms, seated on a craggy rock throne, a sword in his right hand and a coiled rope in his left, a braid of hair falling to one side. His is also the most damaged of the five, and his features are hard to make out, which itself tells you something about how often this painting was unrolled and used.

Gōzanze has three faces and eight arms, two of them crossed at the chest in the mudra that names him, and he treads on the Hindu god Maheśvara and his consort, an image of esoteric Buddhism absorbing an older order. Gundari, a single face and eight arms, is wound about with serpents, a few of them flaring like cobras. Daiitoku is the most startling: six faces, six arms, and six legs, mounted on a water buffalo caught mid-turn, its head swung back. Kongō-yasha, his skin a deep blue, shows three faces and six arms and carries a wheel, a bow and arrow, and a vajra.

One point of confusion is worth clearing up. Tō-ji also owns a famous carved set of the same five kings, part of the three-dimensional mandala of twenty-one statues in the lecture hall, and those sculptures are likewise a National Treasure. They are on view every day. The paintings discussed here are a different work, far more fragile, and shown only on occasion.

Around Tō-ji

The temple is an easy walk from Kyoto Station and rewards a half day. Its five-story pagoda, at about 55 meters the tallest wooden pagoda in Japan, was rebuilt in 1644 under the shogun Tokugawa Iemitsu and has become a symbol of the city. The Kondō, the main hall, holds the principal image, while the neighboring lecture hall, the Kōdō, contains the celebrated arrangement of twenty-one statues, including the sculpted Five Great Wisdom Kings, set out as a mandala you can walk around.

The Treasure Hall, where the painted Godai-son zō appears when it is shown, opens only for the spring and autumn special exhibitions, each built around a theme drawn from the temple's vast holdings of esoteric Buddhist art. If your visit falls on the 21st of any month, the grounds fill with the stalls of the Kōbō-ichi market, held in memory of Kūkai, where antiques, plants, and street food draw crowds from across the region.