Wooden Maitreya Bodhisattva Half-Prostrate Statue

The Maitreya That Weeps

At the center of the Reihōden, Kōryū-ji's treasure hall in the Uzumasa district of western Kyoto, sits the slender figure that was entered as Japan's first registered National Treasure in 1951. Step a little to the right and a second Maitreya waits, smaller and far less photographed, its brows drawn together and two fingers lifted toward a cheek as if catching a tear. The Agency for Cultural Affairs lists it as the Wooden Seated Maitreya in Half-Lotus Position, designation number 50. Almost everyone who visits knows it by a different name: Naki Miroku, the Weeping Maitreya.

Maitreya, Miroku in Japanese, is the buddha still to come, the one believed to descend long after the historical Buddha to finish the work of saving sentient beings. The half-lotus pensive pose freezes one moment of that work. One leg folds down, the other ankle rests on the knee, the head tips slightly forward, a hand floats near the face. The figure is thinking through how salvation might be carried out. On most such images the gesture reads as calm. Here it reads as grief.

Asuka Wood, a Different Origin

The Weeping Maitreya was carved in the Asuka period, the seventh century, the same era as its celebrated neighbor. The two are usually discussed together and just as often confused, so it helps to keep them apart. The famous central figure, the Hōkan or Crowned Maitreya, was cut from a single block of red pine, a timber seldom used for Japanese sculpture, which is one reason many specialists suspect it was made on the Korean peninsula and carried across. The Weeping Maitreya was cut from camphor, kusunoki, the wood that Asuka carvers working in Japan actually preferred. Most scholars therefore read it as domestic work, a Japanese answer to continental models rather than an import.

Its official record runs deep. The image was first protected as an Important Cultural Property in December 1897, under the early Meiji law that began the modern safeguarding of temple and shrine treasures. It rose to National Treasure status on 2 November 1952, the year after the Crowned Maitreya headed the first postwar list. The body is a single-block carving once finished in lacquer and gold leaf, of which only traces survive. One feature sets it apart from almost any other early image. Parts of the drapery, the celestial scarf falling along the sides and the cloth gathered over the right foot, were shaped from leather coated in lacquer rather than carved from the wood.

Standing in Front of It

The hall is kept deliberately dim, and the figures sit with no glass between them and the visitor. Give your eyes a minute to adjust. The Weeping Maitreya is small, roughly 90 centimeters to the top of the base and about 66 centimeters for the figure alone, so you will want to step in close.

Look first at the head. In place of the tall openwork crown of its neighbor, this Maitreya wears its hair gathered into a high topknot, a hōkei, which is where the alternative name Hōkei Miroku comes from. Then the face. The mouth turns down, the eyes sit heavy, and the whole expression carries a weight the smiling Crowned Maitreya does not. Two fingers, index and middle, lift toward the cheek rather than pressing flat against it. Whether the carver meant sorrow, or whether centuries of wear softened the features into something that only looks like sorrow, is an open question worth holding as you watch.

A local tradition, repeated in temple lore rather than fixed in early documents, says the statue was made in memory of Prince Shōtoku and that the downturned face expresses the grief of an ideal left unfinished. Take that as story, not fact. What is certain is that few early Buddhist images in Japan wear an expression like this one, which is reason enough to linger here instead of walking straight past to the celebrity at its side.

Around the Reihōden

Kōryū-ji is the oldest temple in Kyoto, founded in 603 by Hata no Kawakatsu, head of the immigrant Hata clan, to house a Buddhist image he had received from Prince Shōtoku. The Reihōden brings the temple's finest sculpture together under one roof, from the Asuka period through the Kamakura, so the two Maitreyas are only the opening act. Among the company stands a National Treasure Fukūkenjaku Kannon and a long line of Heian and Kamakura figures. There are chairs inside, and sitting while the room resolves in the low light is how regulars treat the place.

The temple stands directly outside Uzumasa-Kōryūji Station on the Randen (Keifuku) Arashiyama line, the small electric tram that runs on west to Arashiyama, which makes Kōryū-ji easy to fold into a day among the gardens and bamboo there. The lacquer-red lecture hall in the precinct, an Important Cultural Property of late Heian date, repays a look on the way in.