White Ink on Painted Paper: Golden Light Sutra (Volume 3)

An Eyeless Sutra Written Over a Forgotten Picture Scroll

Tilt this handscroll toward the light and a second image rises beneath the brushed columns of scripture: rooms with their ceilings gone, robed figures seated and reclining, and faces left blank, drawn with no eyes, noses, or mouths. The picture underneath the holy text was never meant to hold a sutra at all. What you are looking at is the Golden Light Sutra (Konkōmyō-kyō), Volume 3, copied in ink over the line drawing of an abandoned narrative scroll. The missing features gave the work its popular name: Menashikyō, the Eyeless Sutra.

The single scroll is kept at the Kyoto National Museum. It stands about 25 centimeters tall and unrolls to more than eight meters in length, ink on paper, with the secular drawing and the sacred writing sharing the same surface.

Born of a Death in 1192

The scroll begins with a funeral. In the third month of 1192, the cloistered emperor Go-Shirakawa died at the age of sixty-five. A painted narrative handscroll had been in production under his patronage, its scenes already laid out in fine ink line and waiting to receive color. His death halted the work.

Rather than discard the prepared paper, those close to him turned it to a memorial purpose. To pray for the repose of the late sovereign, the sheets of the unfinished painting were used to transcribe Buddhist scripture. A colophon at the close of the scroll records the date of copying as the first day of the fourth month of Kenkyū 3, that is 1192, only weeks after the emperor's passing.

The choice of text fit the occasion. The Golden Light Sutra was long recited for the protection of the realm and its ruler, a scripture bound up with safeguarding and the making of merit. Copying it for a dead emperor was an act of mourning and of prayer at once.

Why It Became a National Treasure

The scroll was designated a National Treasure in 1953. The category of that designation is the unexpected part. It is listed not among works of calligraphy or sacred texts but as a painting, because its importance lies in the drawing beneath the words.

Japanese narrative painting of this period was built up in stages. An artist first set down the whole composition in ink line, then filled the shapes with pigment in the manner of a coloring page, and finally restated in ink the lines that the color had buried. This underdrawing was caught at the first of those stages and never painted over. It freezes the picture scroll mid-process and lets specialists read the working method of yamato-e narrative painting straight off the paper, a kind of evidence that finished, fully colored scrolls cannot give.

Such survivals are rare. The Eyeless Sutra is thought to have once formed a set of four scrolls of the Golden Light Sutra and one of the Rishukyō, the Principle of Wisdom Sutra. Two now survive intact: this volume at the Kyoto National Museum, and a Rishukyō scroll, also a National Treasure, held by the Gotoh Museum in Tokyo. The rest is dispersed as fragments through other collections, among them a section at the Tokyo National Museum.

What to Look For

The drawing rewards a slow eye. Its interiors are shown through a device that painters used to open a building up for the viewer, lifting away the roof and upper walls so the gaze drops straight into the rooms below. The name for it is fukinuki-yatai, the "blown-off roof," and it is a hallmark of classical yamato-e. Inside these open rooms move courtiers in Heian dress, a woman's long layered robes spreading across the floor, a man with a fan in hand.

Their blank faces, the accident that named the scroll, lend the figures a suspended quality, fixed somewhere between sketch and finished art. Running over all of it are the vertical lines of the sutra, holy words inked across a scene of courtly life that has nothing to do with their meaning. That collision of the sacred and the worldly on one sheet is the heart of the object.

What tale the pictures told is still argued. Scholars have pointed to the Tale of Genji and to Ariake no Wakare, "Parting at Daybreak," a romance whose hero moves about unseen beneath a magic cloak. The sheets were rejoined out of their original sequence, and too little of the picture remains for the question to be settled, so the underdrawing keeps part of its secret.

Around the Kyoto National Museum

The Kyoto National Museum sits in the Higashiyama district on the eastern side of the city. The hall of Sanjūsangen-dō, with its long row of standing Kannon statues, stands directly across the street, and the temples and sloping lanes of southern Higashiyama lie within an easy walk.

Like most fragile works on paper, the Eyeless Sutra is not on permanent display. It appears in the museum's rotating presentations of collection highlights and in occasional special exhibitions, and now and then it travels to other museums on loan. Anyone hoping to stand before the original should check the current exhibition schedule before making the trip. For a close look at any time of year, high-resolution images can be studied through Japan's national e-Museum database online.