Unfeng Myoko Ink Painting〈Dahui Ink Writing/Kaishin (Gen.

A Yuan-Era Colophon on a Song-Era Master's Calligraphy

On the first day of the fourth lunar month in 1284, a Chan monk named Yunfeng Miaogao set brush to paper to write a postface on a piece of calligraphy by Dahui Zonggao, a Linji-school master who had died 121 years earlier. The result hangs today in Kyoto as Unpō Myōkō Bokuseki — Colophon on Dahui's Calligraphy, First Day of the Fourth Month of the Jiashen Year, Twenty-first Year of Zhiyuan. The single hanging scroll is held by the Kitamura Bunka Foundation at the Kitamura Museum in the city's Kamigyō ward, and was designated an Important Cultural Property in November 1953.

Bokuseki — literally "ink traces" — refers to the calligraphy of Zen monks, especially the high masters of Song- and Yuan-dynasty China and their early Japanese successors. These works were treasured in Japan less as paintings than as direct, physical contact with a teacher's mind. By the sixteenth century the tea masters had made bokuseki the highest possible decoration for a tea room alcove, and the scroll at the Kitamura Museum belongs to this venerated tradition.

Who Was Yunfeng Miaogao?

Yunfeng Miaogao (Japanese: Unpō Myōkō; 1219–1293) was born into a Confucian family in Changxi, in the coastal Fujian region of southern China. He left home young, took ordination under Master Yunmeng Ze in Wu (today's Suzhou), and travelled through Jiangsu and Zhejiang to study under several leading Chan masters of his day, including Chijue Daochong and Wuzhun Shifan. He eventually became the dharma heir of Yanxi Guangwen of Jingci Temple — which placed him four generations down in the lineage of Dahui Zonggao himself, the very master whose calligraphy he would later inscribe.

Miaogao lived through one of the most turbulent passages in Chinese history. In 1275, as Mongol armies advanced on the Southern Song capital, he was abbot of Jiangshan (Mount Zhong) outside Jinling, today's Nanjing. When soldiers demanded the temple's treasure at sword point, he is said to have stretched out his neck and answered that his head was not their whetstone. The Mongol general Bayan, hearing of the encounter, climbed the mountain to pay him respects and donated cattle to the monastery. Four years before writing this colophon, Miaogao had moved to Jingshan, the great Linji headquarters; four years after writing it, he would travel to Khanbaliq (today's Beijing) at the age of seventy to represent the Chan school in a court debate before Kublai Khan.

The Connection to Dahui Zonggao

Dahui Zonggao (1089–1163) is one of the towering figures in Song-era Chan Buddhism. He gave systematic form to kanhua-chan, the practice of meditation on key phrases drawn from old encounter dialogues — a method that would later become Japanese Rinzai kōan practice. His writings were absorbed into the Buddhist canon, and his calligraphy, valued alongside that of his master Yuanwu Keqin, is among the oldest surviving direct evidence of a Linji master's hand.

When Yunfeng Miaogao took up his brush in 1284, he was not simply admiring an old piece of writing. He was a dharma descendant placing his own ink beside that of an ancestor in his own school. The colophon thus performs a kind of lineage statement, with both calligraphies — Dahui's text and Miaogao's response — reading as a single unit across nearly twelve decades.

Why It Was Designated an Important Cultural Property

The Agency for Cultural Affairs designated the work an Important Cultural Property under the category shoseki / tenseki (calligraphy and classical books) on 14 November 1953. Several factors stand behind the designation. The date and signature on the colophon are explicit and unambiguous, giving an unusually precise anchor in the fourth month of 1284. Yuan-period bokuseki survive in much smaller numbers than Song-era examples. And the document directly attests to the early transmission of the Dahui line — the very strand of Linji Zen that would shape Japanese Rinzai practice through the Daiō–Daitō–Kanzan succession.

Beyond its art-historical weight, the scroll is a witness to the moment when Chinese Chan was carrying itself into the Mongol-ruled new order, and when Japanese monks were already crossing the sea to bring that tradition home to Kamakura and Kyoto.

What to Look For When the Scroll Is Shown

The Kitamura Museum displays its holdings in seasonal exhibitions arranged in the spirit of a tea gathering, so the scroll is not on view year round. When it does appear, a few things repay close attention.

First, watch the brushwork itself. Chan calligraphy is not decorative writing; the line is supposed to come from the same mental ground as a master's spoken teaching. Strong horizontal strokes, the way a vertical column closes, the rhythm between dry and wet ink — these are read in Japan as expressions of personality and inner state.

Second, look at the relationship between the two hands on the scroll: the older calligraphy on which the colophon was written, and Yunfeng Miaogao's response to it. The way a later master places his brush in dialogue with an inherited piece of writing carries meaning of its own.

The Kitamura collection also holds bokuseki by Wuxue Zuyuan, Wu'an Puning, Lanxi Daolong, Shixi Xinyue and others — a concentration of Song- and Yuan-era Zen calligraphy uncommon outside the great temple archives.

Visiting the Kitamura Museum

The Kitamura Museum (北村美術館) sits a short walk from the Kamo River delta at Demachiyanagi, in the northeast quadrant of central Kyoto. It opened in 1977 to house the collection of Kitamura Kinjirō (1904–1991), an industrialist from the Yoshino forestry country in Nara who, with his wife, spent half a century gathering tea-ceremony art. The museum's holdings include thirty-three nationally designated Important Cultural Properties, with the bokuseki tradition unusually well represented.

The building is small and intentionally quiet. The collection is shown twice a year — in spring (roughly mid-March to early June) and autumn (roughly early September to early December) — with each exhibition arranged like the utensil pairings of an actual tea gathering. The neighbouring residential garden, Shikunshien (四君子苑), opens for only about a week in each season. It is a sukiya estate by the master carpenter Kitamura Sutejirō, with a later main hall by the modern sukiya architect Yoshida Isoya, and the garden contains stone lanterns and a pagoda registered as Important Cultural Properties in their own right.

Around the Kitamura Museum

The museum stands at the edge of one of Kyoto's most concentrated cultural districts. The Kyoto Imperial Palace and its surrounding gyoen, with long gravel paths and seasonal blossoms, lies a few minutes' walk west across Kawaramachi. The Demachi Masugata Shopping Street, just north, is one of the city's older covered arcades, and a good place to stop for traditional sweets — Demachi Futaba's famous mame-mochi is the local landmark.

Visitors with deeper interest in Buddhist calligraphy and painting can continue south along the river to the Hosomi Museum, which holds a strong collection of pre-modern Japanese art including bokuseki and Zen-related works. Further south near Shichijō, the Kyoto National Museum mounts regular thematic exhibitions of calligraphy and Zen art on a larger scale.