A Collection of Ancient Virtues, Volume 8, Written on Paper

Shūi Kotokuden, Volume Eight: An Illustrated Life of Hōnen

This single handscroll, painted in ink and mineral colors on paper, is one part of a nine-scroll biography of Hōnen (1133–1212), the priest who founded the Jōdo, or Pure Land, school of Japanese Buddhism. The full work is titled Shūi Kotokuden, and this Important Cultural Property is its eighth scroll. It dates from the Kamakura period and is held today in a private collection in Tokyo.

The text that runs through the scrolls was composed in 1301 by the priest Kakunyo, third head of Hongan-ji and a great-grandson of Shinran. A follower in Hitachi province, the eastern region that is now Ibaraki Prefecture, asked him for a life of Hōnen, and by one early account Kakunyo drafted the whole biography in just seventeen days. To work that quickly he leaned on biographies that already existed, the recensions known to specialists as the Rin'a and Gugan texts. The paintings that illustrate his words were added later, in the traditional Yamato-e manner of the late Kamakura age.

Why It Matters

The scroll was designated an Important Cultural Property on 30 January 1934. Its value lies less in any single brushstroke than in the point of view it carries.

Picture-scroll lives of Hōnen were produced in some number during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, almost all of them from within the Jōdo school he had founded. The Shūi Kotokuden came from a different direction. Kakunyo belonged to the Shinshū, the True Pure Land lineage centered on Hongan-ji, and he shaped the biography to argue that his own great-grandfather, Shinran, stood in the legitimate line of Hōnen's teaching. The relationship between master and disciple is set out here in unusual detail.

The title points to the same purpose. Shūi means "gleanings," the things left lying in the field after the main harvest; kotoku, "the old man of virtue," is Hōnen himself. The work gathers up what earlier biographies had passed over, above all the closeness between Hōnen and Shinran. A complete nine-scroll set survives at Jōfuku-ji in Ibaraki, dated by the colophon of its ninth scroll to 1323. The privately held eighth scroll described here is a separate surviving piece of the same tradition.

What to Look For

An illustrated handscroll is read from right to left, the hand unrolling a little at a time so that passages of calligraphy give way to painted scenes and then to calligraphy again. The reader moves through the story almost the way the original viewer did, at walking pace, one episode at a time.

Across the nine scrolls the narrative carries Hōnen from birth to death. The later scrolls hold the hardest chapters of his life. In 1207 the court, pressed by the older Buddhist establishments, banned the exclusive practice of the nenbutsu and sent Hōnen into exile in distant Tosa, on the island of Shikoku; he was pardoned, returned toward Kyoto, and died at Ōtani in the eastern hills of the capital in 1212. Volume eight falls within this closing stretch of the account.

Here the Shūi Kotokuden diverges from other versions. Shinran was banished in the very same persecution of 1207, to Echigo on the Japan Sea coast, and a biography written to honor him gives the events of these years a weight that the Jōdo-school scrolls do not. The painter's task was to make doctrine legible as human incident: a journey on foot, a parting, a teacher speaking from a sickbed. Look for how the figures' robes and gestures do that work, and for the way buildings are shown with their roofs lifted away so the eye can drop straight into the rooms within.

Where to See Related Works

Because this scroll is privately owned, it is not on regular public display, and visitors cannot expect to view it on a given day. The wider tradition it belongs to is, happily, easy to meet elsewhere.

The Tokyo National Museum holds a cut section from a Shūi Kotokuden scroll showing Hōnen in debate with Kōin, a learned monk of Onjō-ji, over the Pure Land teaching; the figure in dark robes turning his prayer beads is Hōnen. In Kyoto, Chion-in preserves the Hōnen Shōnin gyōjō ezu, a National Treasure in forty-eight scrolls and the fullest visual life of Hōnen ever made. The complete nine-scroll Shūi Kotokuden at Jōfuku-ji in Ibaraki is itself an Important Cultural Property and is shown from time to time. Major museums in Tokyo, Kyoto, and Nara rotate medieval biographical scrolls of this kind into their exhibitions through the year, and checking a museum's current schedule before a visit is the surest way to see one.