Amida Buddha

Amida Buddha is a hanging-scroll painting by Murakami Kagaku in ink and color on silk, completed in 1916 and now held by the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art (Kyōto-shi Bijutsukan), with dimensions of approximately 209 by 131 centimeters. The work is one of the earliest of Kagaku's major Buddhist figural paintings and predates by two years his co-founding of the Kokuga Sōsaku Kyōkai in 1918. Amida (Amitābha), the Buddha of the Western Paradise and the central figure of the Pure Land tradition that has shaped Japanese popular religion since the medieval period, is here shown in seated meditation, the iconography drawn from the canonical Pure Land paintings of medieval Japan but rendered with the soft, atmospheric handling that Kagaku had absorbed from his Kyoto teachers and from his early studies of Ajanta cave painting. The work establishes the iconographic and stylistic foundations of the Buddhist figural tradition that Kagaku would develop over the next two decades, culminating in the great Bodhisattva paintings of his Suma retirement period.