Illustrated Gleanings from the Legends of Past Virtues

The museum has acquired one of eleven surviving sections of a set of Japanese illustrated handscrolls painted in the early fourteenth century. The first major work in the yamatoe style to enter the collection, the portion of a large format handscroll has been remounted as a hanging scroll. A second section from the same set is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The remaining sections remain in private hands in Japan. Titled Illustrated Gleanings from the Legends of Past Virtues, the set is one version of an illustrated biography of the founder of Japan's Pure Land School of Buddhism, Honen-bo Genko (1133-1212). According to notes made in the diary of the True Pure Land monk Zonkaku (1290-1373) and the postscript of a text version of the biography in the possession of the Nishi-Honganji temple in Kyoto, the original production was undertaken by the monk Kakunyo (1270-1351), the great-grandson of Honen's disciple Shinran (1173-1236), and was commissioned in the winter of 1301 by Nagai Michinobu of the Kajima community of True Pure Land School practitioners. The section acquired by the museum comes from one of four versions of the biography extant today produced prior to Kakunyo's death. Of these versions, three, including the version to which the museum's portion belongs, are incomplete. There is consensus that the museum's portion belongs to the earliest of the four versions. The group was previously in a private collection in Ashiya City in Hyogo Prefacture, Japan, but was likely originally made for the Tokoku community of Shinran's followers. The paintings of this version may have been produced in the capital of Kyoto, at an atelier associated with Shinran's community. The unusually large scale of the handscroll, with a height much larger than a typical handscroll of this date, indicated that it was likely used for pictorial exegesis by Shinran's followers. The content of the scene corresponds to the pivotal second scene of the sixth scrool of the nine-scroll biography. Honen is surrounded by his disciples as he requests they sign a pledge to uphold thier practices without denigrating those of others. The calligraphy to the right of the scene represents the signatures of his disciples. In the painting both Honen and Shinran are recognizable from their similarities to famous Kamakura period (1185-1333) portraits of the two.