This painting captures the activities of a spring day at Chōmeiji Temple, situated on a hill overlooking Lake Biwa, just east of Kyoto. A wealth of details relates the activities of the temple monks and visitors, who visited the temple to make offerings to the central object of worship, an eleven-headed Kannon, the bodhisattva of compassion. Pilgrimage mandalas (sankei mandara) like this one relate the miraculous stories and seasonal activities of famous temples or shrines. Itinerant preachers used them in a form of storytelling known as etoki, or “picture-narration.” This example was no doubt employed to help raise funds for the rebuilding of the Chōmeiji Temple complex after it was razed by fire in 1516.
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Credit Line:Purchase, Sue Cassidy Clark Gift, in honor of D. Max Moerman, 2016
Accession Number:2016.517
Pilgrimage mandalas were commissioned beginning in the sixteenth century by Japanese Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines as a means of disseminating the history of a famous religious site, proselytizing, and fundraising. Itinerant storytellers would carry the paintings to urban centers and through countryside villages to use as props for a form of storytelling known as “picture-narration” (etoki). This type of mandala emerged from more schematically rendered mandalas that show layouts of temple or shrine complexes in landscape settings, but without figures or human activity depicted. By the sixteenth century, when patronage systems for many temples shifted their emphasis from reliance on the court or elite military support, there was a greater interest in raising money from the general public through small donations of commoners. Pilgrimage mandalas arose just at this time and can be considered a popular art form aimed at the masses. The style of the works reflects this democratic appeal. The artists were not from the elite painting ateliers, but were so called “town painters” (machi-eshi) commissioned by temples. We can identify pictorial trademarks of certain workshops, and can assume that certain painters specialized in creating pilgrimage mandalas.
This variety of Chōmeiji pilgrimage mandala was created to help raise funds for the rebuilding of the temple complex after it was razed by wartime fire in 1516. The present example, focusing on Chōmeiji Temple, situated on a hill overlooking Lake Biwa just east of Kyoto, is the earliest and finest known example of its type. Most surviving examples are either in disastrously poor condition or are later copies dating to the seventeenth or eighteenth century. This example was originally a hanging scroll, but to preserve and make it more accessible for display it was remounted as a two-panel screen at some time in its history. Other than restoration of the upper right and left corners (areas of sky and clouds), it is in a remarkably excellent state of preservation, with all the vignettes of figures intact and unretouched. Chōmeiji Temple still owns a very similar example of this pilgrimage mandala dating from the late sixteenth century, and at least three others dating to the seventeeth or eighteenth century. It is assumed that this earlier version was probably given to a temple patron sometime early in its history, which accounts for its preservation in remarkably good condition.
Early in the temple’s history, Sasaki Hideyoshi (1112–1184), a samurai of the Minamoto clan, had commissioned the rebuilding of Chōmeiji as a memorial for his father in the late twelfth century. As mentioned above, the entire temple complex of Chōmeiji was leveled by fire in 1516 during warfare that affected the whole Kyoto area. According to Japanese researchers, the halls are actually depicted in the painting as they were laid out before the devastating fire, and thus represent a hope to restore the temple to its former glory. Temple records reveal that a campaign to rebuild the temple complex began the year after the fire, in 1517. Documentary evidence, visual hints in the painting, and stylistic considerations suggest a date of between 1524 and 1547. As a specific example, if we compare this example to the later one surviving at Chōmeiji, we discover that a donation-collecting monk (kanjin hijiri) is depicted here in the Solicitation Hall (below the Main Hall to the left), while the later version is show a donation-collection nun (kanjin bikuni); the shift in gender of the clerics collecting donations took place in the late 1540s. We can imagine an itinerant storyteller using the painting as a prop to point out the fascinating vignettes of ancient and recent history of the temple, and to persuade members of his or her audience to make a donation for its reconstruction.
Viewing this two-panel screen from a distance, we observe a temple complex situated upon a rounded mountaintop, the very type of gently curving landscape that epitomizes the idealized painting of the traditional Japanese paintings (yamato-e) of early medieval times. Yet, in the case of the Chōmeiji pilgrimage mandalas, the stylized depiction of the rounded mountain accentuates the actual geographic features of the mountaintop temple. Even though it looks highly idealized, in fact the mountain upon which it sits is gently rounded if seen from the distance. This type of mandala borrowed conventions from other types of paintings of pilgrimage sites, including those related to Mount Fuji or the island temple Hōgonji on Chikubushima in Lake Biwa.
From up close, a wealth of genre detail brings the painting to life and sheds light on the temple’s activities. The depiction of activities that would have happened at discrete times within a single landscape and natural scene is a traditional Japanese narrative painting technique called iji-dōzu, or “different events in same background scene.” On this fictive spring day, something is happening simultaneously in every corner of the picture.
Along the lower edge of the painting, pilgrims arrive by little boats, three or four to a vessel, that have been used to cross Lake Biwa to reach the temple. At the base of the 808 stone steps (all still there today) leading up to the temple, a group of female lay devotees (identifiable by their headwear), assisted by laborers in loincloths, haul a large timber up the path, which indicates that the temple was still undergoing reconstruction when this work was commissioned. The set of buildings to the immediate right of the base of steps is a Shinto shrine, with a torii gate entrance—a reminder that in premodern Japan, temples always incorporated shrines to local deities (kami).
The little huts along the lakeshore sell local specialties and refreshments, or serve as inns where wayfarers can rest for the night. According to Talia Andrei, a graduate student at Columbia University who has done extensive research on this subject, pilgrimage mandalas such as here include faithful details of secular goings-on. For instance, she notes that the woman in a red robe standing in front of the middle structure among the five connected huts is most probably a prostitute greeting male passersby looking for diversion after a long trek to the mountainside. A woman peeking out from a curtain is a code for a brothel in such genre paintings.
Under a waterfall to the right of the main hall, a pilgrim performs ablutions by standing beneath a waterfall. The waterfall is marked a magical symbol associated with the Buddhist deity Fudō Myōō.
To the lower left of the main hall, in a fenced-off area demarcated by cherry trees in bloom, a group of monks and pilgrims play a lively game of kemari, a type of aristocratic kickball. The existence of a kemari court at Chōmeiji Temple refers back to a legend of a visit of Emperor Tenji (614–671) to the ancient site of the temple and engaging in a game of kemari.
The Main Image Hall, in the center of the composition, has an outer sanctum where we can see monks reciting sutras and performing a ritual service (that was customarily held on the eighteenth day of every month); lay devotees remain on the veranda. The inner sanctum of the hall houses a rarely revealed image of Eleven-headed Kannon, the compassionate bodhisattva (not visible in the image). Chōmeiji became famous for its image of Kannon, and was the thirty-first stop on the famous pilgrimage route of the Thirty-three Stations of the Western Provinces (Japanese: Saikoku sanjūsan reijo). Though pilgrimage mandalas were created for many of the temples on these routes, especially the first stop at Nachi, Chōmeiji is arguably one of the most scenically gorgeous temples along the route. Though pilgrims by the hundreds make daily visits to the temple, the image is kept hidden from public view, but prayers to the unseen image are said to heal illness and insure long life.
Art historians who have seen the sculpture date it to the Heian period, though temple legends relate it was carved by Shōtoku Taishi (574–622), a prince-regent of ancient times who was instrumental in the adoption of Buddhism as the official religion of Japan. The covered well to the left of the Image Hall is where Prince Shōtoku was said to have discovered a Buddhist statue. He is said to have prayed to be granted long life at the temple, which accounts for the present name of Chōmeiji, literally, “Temple of Long Life.” The temple’s history becomes more reliable from the twelfth century on, and through the medieval period it suffered through vagaries of ever shifting patronage and natural disasters. Razed by fire in 1615, the Main Image Hall was reconstructed six years later.
Halfway up the stone steps, posted in a Solicitation Hall, a monk holding a long-handled ladle is collecting donations from visitors. We know from records that monks carried out this duty until around 1547, which gives a terminus ante quem for the production of the painting. After this time, nuns carried out this duty, through the eighteenth century.
—John T. Carpenter (March 20, 2021)
Chomeiji Temple; private collection , Kyoto area; [ Mayuyama & Co., Ltd. , Tokyo]; Mrs. D. Ellenberger , Paris; Dr. Peter V. Huggler , Zurich, Switzerland (by 1987–d. 2015; by family descent; sale, Christie's South Kensington, Asobi: Ingenious Creativity, Japanese Works of Art from Antiquity to Contemporary, October 15, 2014, lot 4, pp. 8–14, as "An Important Two-Fold Screen Depicting Chomeiji Sankei Mandara [Chomeiji Temple Pilgrimage Mandala]," bought in; sold August 2016, to MMA
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