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Lot Essay
The New York art dealer Marian Willard (see lots 294 and 295) included this portrait in her Willard Gallery sale exhibitions of Japanese art in 1955 and again in 1960. It did not sell and remained in her personal collection, overlooked until now, nearly sixty years later.
The illustrious priest Eison (1201–1290) is seated cross-legged in the traditional formal pose in a high-backed chair draped with a pale green brocade textile. He is elderly, with long white eyebrows, a shaved head and wearing a brown kesa (monk’s vestment) over his black robe. On an altar table in front of him, Eison displays the three ritual items that a priest of the Ritsu sect would use to administer the precepts: a wooden clapper used in ordination ceremonies when chanting Buddhist texts (kaishaku), a long-handled, gilt-bronze censor, or incense burner, in the shape of a lotus, and a neatly tied bundle with the three kinds of garments a priest was expected to own.
Eison founded the Kamakura-period movement to revive Buddhist moral precepts; this movement later became the Shingon Ritsu sect. He was born in Nara Prefecture but from age seven he trained at Daigo-ji Temple in Kyoto. Following his ordination as a priest at age seventeen, he labored to promote a commitment to prescribed moral imperatives. It was his response to the perceived moral despair that drove the popular new Pure Land sect. In 1238, after a period of training at Todai-ji Temple in Nara, he began the renovation of the dilapidated Saidai-ji Temple in Nara, where he propagated his simplified practice of the precepts. He took the multiarmed Wisdom King Aizen Myōō as his personal deity and presided over mass ordinations, distributing ordination certificates. Six such certificates, inscribed with both Sanskrit and Chinese characters, were found within the “Sedgwick Shōtoku,” a sculpture datable to about 1292, now in the Harvard Art Museums/Arthur M. Sackler Museum. For more on that subject, see Rachel Saunders, “Secrets of the Sedgwick Shotoku,” Impressions 40 (2019), journal of the Japanese Art Society of America (www.japaneseartsoc.org).
Eison was a humanitarian, caring for the poor and establishing animal sanctuaries. He is even credited with prayers that helped ward off the Mongol Invasion in 1281. He died at the age of eighty-nine. Following a custom of honoring outstanding priests, Emperor Go-Fushimi bestowed Eison with the title “Kosho Bodhisattva” in 1300.
Several similar portraits of Eison survive from as early as the fourteenth century, mostly in the collection of Saidai-ji and other temples around Nara. However, followers of Eison remained active in the Edo period and contributed to the flowering of early modern Buddhist art. Such portraits probably served a ritual function in memorial services.
The illustrious priest Eison (1201–1290) is seated cross-legged in the traditional formal pose in a high-backed chair draped with a pale green brocade textile. He is elderly, with long white eyebrows, a shaved head and wearing a brown kesa (monk’s vestment) over his black robe. On an altar table in front of him, Eison displays the three ritual items that a priest of the Ritsu sect would use to administer the precepts: a wooden clapper used in ordination ceremonies when chanting Buddhist texts (kaishaku), a long-handled, gilt-bronze censor, or incense burner, in the shape of a lotus, and a neatly tied bundle with the three kinds of garments a priest was expected to own.
Eison founded the Kamakura-period movement to revive Buddhist moral precepts; this movement later became the Shingon Ritsu sect. He was born in Nara Prefecture but from age seven he trained at Daigo-ji Temple in Kyoto. Following his ordination as a priest at age seventeen, he labored to promote a commitment to prescribed moral imperatives. It was his response to the perceived moral despair that drove the popular new Pure Land sect. In 1238, after a period of training at Todai-ji Temple in Nara, he began the renovation of the dilapidated Saidai-ji Temple in Nara, where he propagated his simplified practice of the precepts. He took the multiarmed Wisdom King Aizen Myōō as his personal deity and presided over mass ordinations, distributing ordination certificates. Six such certificates, inscribed with both Sanskrit and Chinese characters, were found within the “Sedgwick Shōtoku,” a sculpture datable to about 1292, now in the Harvard Art Museums/Arthur M. Sackler Museum. For more on that subject, see Rachel Saunders, “Secrets of the Sedgwick Shotoku,” Impressions 40 (2019), journal of the Japanese Art Society of America (www.japaneseartsoc.org).
Eison was a humanitarian, caring for the poor and establishing animal sanctuaries. He is even credited with prayers that helped ward off the Mongol Invasion in 1281. He died at the age of eighty-nine. Following a custom of honoring outstanding priests, Emperor Go-Fushimi bestowed Eison with the title “Kosho Bodhisattva” in 1300.
Several similar portraits of Eison survive from as early as the fourteenth century, mostly in the collection of Saidai-ji and other temples around Nara. However, followers of Eison remained active in the Edo period and contributed to the flowering of early modern Buddhist art. Such portraits probably served a ritual function in memorial services.