Silk Painted Tathagata Statue (Temple Tradition Medicine

A Chinese buddha on a Japanese mountain

Among the painted treasures of Mount Koya is a buddha who came from abroad. This hanging scroll, colour on silk, was made not in Japan but in China, under the Yuan dynasty, and at some point crossed the sea to enter the holdings of Kongobuji, the head temple of Koyasan Shingon Buddhism. It was designated an Important Cultural Property on 8 February 1958.

The work is a careful study in how titles record what is known and what is not. The temple has long called the figure Yakushi, the Medicine Buddha, the healer who holds a medicine jar and presides over the eastern paradise. The official designation, however, names it simply Image of a Buddha. That difference is deliberate. The painting lacks the clear attributes that would fix the figure's identity beyond doubt, so the national listing records what can be seen, a seated buddha, and leaves the specific name to the temple's tradition.

For a visitor this is a useful lesson in how to read a Buddhist painting. The temple's name for the figure, Yakushi, is a transmitted tradition rather than a proven fact, and the gap between the two is part of the work's interest, not a flaw in it.

The journey of imported paintings

Chinese Buddhist paintings of the Song and Yuan dynasties were prized in Japan, brought back by monks who studied on the mainland and treasured for a finish and a sense of volume that differed from Japanese work of the time. Temples received them as objects of devotion and as models for their own painters. A Yuan-period buddha entering the collection of Koya, the spiritual centre of Shingon, fits this long current of exchange across the sea.

Set beside the native paintings of Mount Koya, this scroll lets a viewer feel the difference of another workshop tradition: the modelling of the body, the handling of drapery and pigment, the particular weight of a continental hand. Its value as an Important Cultural Property rests partly on that, as a witness on the mountain to the art of Yuan China and to the traffic of sacred images between the two countries.

Reading the uncertainty

The honest answer to "which buddha is this?" is that the temple says Yakushi and the official record withholds judgement. Rather than a problem, this is exactly the kind of nuance that rewards a slow look. Does the figure hold anything that would mark it as the Medicine Buddha? What in the pose and the robes points to a Yuan rather than a Japanese origin? Standing before the painting with the tradition and the cautious official title both in mind turns a passing glance into a small act of looking closely.

Seeing the painting

The scroll is conserved through the Koyasan Reihokan, the museum that holds the treasures of the mountain's temples. As with the other fragile paintings of Koya, it is not on permanent view and appears in special and grand-treasure exhibitions on a rotating schedule. Anyone hoping to see this imported buddha in person should check the museum's current programme before travelling, and may find it most rewarding alongside the museum's Japanese Buddhist paintings, where the contrast between native and continental work comes into focus.