Wooden Seated Statues of the Five Wisdom Buddhas

Five Figures, National Treasure since 2019

Wooden Seated Statues of the Five Wisdom Buddhas (木造五智如来坐像, Mokuzo Gochi Nyorai Zazo) are Heian-period sculptures at the Kyoto National Museum, 527 Chaya-cho, Higashiyama Ward, Kyoto City, Kyoto Prefecture, made an Important Cultural Property on 29 August 1910 and designated a National Treasure on 23 July 2019. The quantity is five figures, the designation number 00138, and the owner Anshoji. Nothing is designated as an appendage.

The category is sculpture. Painting, craft, calligraphy and books, historical material, archaeological material and other have all appeared; this category is new, as is the measure word for figures.

The Agency's commentary reads: a work of the Heian period. This is the eighteenth one-sentence commentary among the properties covered here.

A Hundred and Nine Years between the Two Listings

The interval stands out.

Important Cultural Property in 1910, National Treasure in 2019: a hundred and nine years apart.

Intervals among the properties covered here have been twenty-two years for the Taihi Tenmoku bowl, forty-three for the Yohen Tenmoku, forty-seven for the Taima Mandara Engi, fifty-two for the Ippen biography and sixty-six for the four commanders. For the Inariyama finds it was two. A hundred and nine is the longest.

The listing of 1910 belongs to a system that preceded the present law. With the Tendai patriarchs, an 1901 listing likewise survived in a municipal record.

A designation in 2019 is among the more recent encountered here, after Manpukuji in 2024, the Sanmyakuinki, Sarashina Diary and Soranjo in 2023, and Yasaka Shrine in 2020.

Two Databases Give Different Names

The wording of the name differs as well.

The national database gives the name as wooden seated statues of the Five Wisdom Buddhas. Cultural Heritage Online displays it as seated statues of the Five Wisdom Buddhas. The difference is whether the word for wooden appears.

With the Vajrabhadrani Sutra and the Meihoki, the two databases differed over category. Here they differ over the name.

Wooden indicates the material, in the same way that color on silk or ink on paper stands at the head of other titles.

This article follows the national database, whose fields are the more detailed, and uses the longer form.

What Is Not in the Record

The record is short, and what it omits is worth setting down.

The field for dimensions and weight is empty. So is the field for form and condition, the field for the maker, and the fields for era and Western year.

Accounts elsewhere describe these as the oldest images of the Five Wisdom Buddhas in Japan. The Agency's record contains no comparison with other images, and this article does not make that claim.

Only three bowls in the world, for the Yohen Tenmoku, and surviving only in Japan, for the Meihoki, were likewise dropped for want of support. By contrast, the oldest surviving piece of Japanese writing, for the Inariyama finds, does stand in the record. Whether a claim appears there decides how it is treated.

What the record establishes is this: five sculptures, of the Heian period, owned by Anshoji, listed in 1910 and designated in 2019.

Seeing Them

The statues are at the Kyoto National Museum and owned by Anshoji. The temple owns; the museum keeps.

The Jittoku painting is owned by a foundation and kept by a museum; the Tendai patriarchs are owned by a temple and on deposit at a museum. Ownership and keeping divided in this way keeps recurring.

They are a museum holding, not kept on permanent display, and all five are not necessarily shown at once.

Exhibition plans can change, so check the museum's information before travelling.