16 Arhats in Color on Silk

The Sixteen Arhats: Japan's Earliest Surviving Set of Rakan Paintings

Sixteen hanging scrolls, each standing a little under a metre tall, together form one of the oldest Buddhist paintings to come down to us in Japan. They were painted in mineral colours on silk during the 11th century, in the late Heian period, and are now held by the Tokyo National Museum in Ueno. Each scroll measures roughly 96 by 52 centimetres, and every one is given over to a single figure: a member of the group known in Japanese as the Jūroku Rakan, the Sixteen Arhats.

An arhat (rakan) is a disciple who has reached the far shore of Buddhist practice and freed himself from the cycle of rebirth. The Sixteen Arhats are a specific group named in a sutra translated into Chinese by the monk Xuanzang in the 7th century. According to that text, the Buddha asked these sixteen senior followers to remain in the world rather than pass into final extinction, so that they might guard his teaching and carry it to people until a future buddha appears. Painting them as a set of sixteen separate images, one disciple to each scroll, became a long tradition in East Asian Buddhist art, and this Heian set is the earliest example that survives in Japan.

Why It Was Named a National Treasure

The set is regarded as the finest, as well as the oldest, of the surviving arhat paintings made in Japan, and it holds a central place among Buddhist paintings of the 11th century. Much of its reputation rests on tone. Where many later arhat pictures, especially those that became popular from the medieval period onward, played up the strange and the dramatic, giving the disciples gnarled, almost grotesque features set in turbulent scenes, the figures here are calm, courteous, and very human. Each elder sits in quiet company, attended by disciples or younger monks, in compositions that vary from scroll to scroll rather than repeating a fixed formula.

Scholars have long noticed that the buildings, trees, and indoor furnishings depicted in the scrolls point back to an older Chinese source. The architecture and the interior settings preserve conventions that reach back to Tang-dynasty painting, which suggests the Heian artists were working from a model with much earlier roots. That blend of an imported prototype with a distinctly Heian sense of colour is part of what makes the set so valued.

Its standing was recognised early. The paintings were listed as a National Treasure under the old system in 1900, and they were designated again as a National Treasure under the present Law for the Protection of Cultural Properties on 14 November 1953. For most of their history they belonged to Shōjuraigōji, a temple in Ōtsu in Shiga Prefecture, beside Lake Biwa. They entered the Tokyo National Museum in 1950, bought from the temple in two lots of eight scrolls, one in May and one in July, shortly before the current cultural-property law came into force.

What to Look For

The colour is the first thing to study, and the way it was achieved is unusual. The painters kept metallic pigments such as gold leaf and gold paint to a minimum and built the surface instead from bright, clear mineral colours applied to both faces of the silk. The technique of painting from the back, called urazaishiki, lets colour show through the weave from behind. The result is a soft, even glow rather than a flat coat of paint, and it gives the skin of the figures a gentle, almost translucent quality. Even after roughly nine centuries the hues remain remarkably fresh.

Look next at the top of each scroll, where a rectangular panel called a shikishigata is set into the picture. These panels carry the name of the arhat and the place he was said to dwell. The grounds of the panels are decorated with small flowers and birds, the kind of refined ornament a Heian aristocrat would have admired. That decoration has been compared to the painted panels of the Phoenix Hall at Byōdō-in near Kyoto, which helps anchor the set firmly in the visual world of the eleventh-century court.

One figure carries a name many visitors in Japan will recognise. The first arhat, Pindola Bharadvaja, is known affectionately across Japan as Obinzuru-sama. His statues sit at the entrances of many temples, worn smooth by worshippers who touch the part of the body they hope to heal. Seeing him here as a young, composed painted figure, long before that folk devotion took shape, is a quiet pleasure.

One practical point shapes any visit. The sixteen scrolls are fragile and light-sensitive, so they are never all shown together. The museum displays them one or two at a time, rotating which arhats are on view, usually in the National Treasure Gallery or in Room 3 of the main building. A trip will reward you with a single scroll seen closely rather than the whole company at once.

Around the Museum

The Tokyo National Museum sits at the northern end of Ueno Park, a short walk from Ueno Station. The park is one of the densest clusters of museums and galleries in Japan, so a day here can easily take in the National Museum of Western Art, the National Museum of Nature and Science, and the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum without much walking between them.

The park itself was once the precinct of Kan'eiji, a great temple founded to protect the city from the northeast. Traces of that history remain, including the Ueno Tōshōgū shrine with its gilded hall and stone lanterns, and a five-storey pagoda visible from the zoo grounds. Combining the painted arhats inside the museum with these surviving religious sites outside makes for a coherent half-day on Buddhist and Edo-period Tokyo.