Page 211 - Edo: Art in Japan, 1615–1868

supernormal powers depicted in explicit detail, represented, not unlike the Europeans in Nagasaki, a

distinctive class of enlightened barbarians. Brought to Japan by Chinese monks of the Obaku Zen sect
who were fleeing the collapse of the Ming dynasty, the rakan cult's distinctively continental qualities
appealed to the Edo populace. Portrayed in painting and statuary, rakan were enshrined in temples and
in outdoor settings across Japan. Pilgrims and tourists flocked to life-size groupings of these sacred
figures, arranged in sculptural dioramas, for worship and for entertainment. In addition to prayers and
offerings, visitors enjoyed the game of finding, in the physiognomy of the vast saintly lineup, faces
that reminded them of personal acquaintances. Toward the end of Saikaku's life of an Amorous Woman
the heroine, now an aged prostitute, finds herself at Daiunji, a temple on the western outskirts of Kyoto
210 that housed one such collection. After taking part in the ritual recitation of the Buddha's name, she
then identifies from among the statues of the Five Hundred Rakan those who resemble many of her past
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lovers. Visitors to the Rakanji, or the Temple of the Five Hundred Arhats, at the eastern edge of the city
of Edo, could not only admire an enormous tableau of the Buddha preaching the Lotus Sutra to the
assembled rakan (see cat. 115) but also visit in condensed form three of the country's famous pilgrimage
circuits. Climbing, in circumambulatory fashion, the spiral ramps of the temple's unusual three-storied
Turbo Hall (Sazaedó), pilgrims passed one hundred statues of the Bodhisattva Kannon, copies of the
images from the thirty-three-station pilgrimages of the Chichibu, Bantó, and Saikoku regions, and were
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rewarded with a panoramic view from the upper veranda. This remarkable urban vista, from what
was perhaps the city's tallest ascendable building, was a delight to pilgrims and tourists alike and was
celebrated in Edo's illustrated guidebooks and in the popular prints of Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849).
The religious art of Soga Shóhaku (1730 -1781) bears a typically Edo combination of the tradi-

tional, the devotional, the popular, and the bizarre. The individual subjects of Shóhaku's Demon and
Doji (cat. 117) belong to the familiar cast of Buddhist characters that appear in much earlier Buddhist
painting. But the combination seen here is rare, taken from an apocryphal source outside of the
Buddhist canon. Their treatment as well, an unusual mixture of the humorous and the erotic, signals
something decidedly different. It is as if the traditional figures of Buddhist iconography have left the
confines of the temples and entered the public sphere, into a brave new world in which the modes of
representation were far less circumscribed, open to a playful experimentation that can approach, as
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with Shóhaku's Daoist Immortals (cat. 119), the realm of parody. A Buddhist Priest Warding off a Demon
(cat. 118) by Hokusai, whose vast corpus includes more drama, parody, and piety than most Edo artists,
also blends the traditional with the fantastic. A priest is seated in meditation with his only weapon, a
roll of Buddhist scripture, raised before him; he uses his great spiritual powers to subdue his demonic
foe. While this portrait may seem, to the modern viewer at least, more that of a superhero of manga
(Japanese comic books) or anime (animated cartoons), it is also indebted to a long tradition of visual
hagiography. Hokusai's painting can be seen as a popular continuation of the narrative scrolls of
earlier centuries that chronicled and celebrated the miraculous powers of Buddhist saints.
It should not be surprising that the most sacred image of Buddhist hagiography became a
favored topic of parody in Edo religious art. The scene of the Buddha's death, or pariniruana, traditionally
depicts Shakyamuni lying on his right side in a grove of sala trees surrounded by all form of beings

grieving his passage (fig. i). The leaves of the trees that shade the Buddha turn white in mourning,
and the Buddha's mother, Lady Maya, even descends from the heavens to witness the event. Based
in the Mahayana sutras as well as on the liturgical texts of medieval clerics, the iconography of the