Emperor Wu Meets Bodhidharma

Emperor Wu Meets Bodhidharma (Ryō Butei Daruma to aimamiyu no zu), painted in 1914 and held in the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (MOMAT), depicts the founding encounter of the Chan (Zen) Buddhist tradition: the meeting at Nanjing in 520 between the Indian patriarch Bodhidharma, who had recently arrived in southern China, and Emperor Wu of the Liang dynasty (r. 502-549), the most ardent imperial patron of Buddhism in early-medieval China. The famous dialogue — Wu asks what merit he has acquired by his many monasteries and pious donations, Bodhidharma replies 'no merit at all,' and Bodhidharma subsequently withdraws to the Shaolin Monastery — became the foundational kōan of the Chan tradition and one of the most repeated subjects of East Asian Buddhist painting. Nakamura Fusetsu's oil rendering, painted in the firmly modelled, low-keyed academic manner of his Paris training, brings Western academic figure painting to bear on a subject that had been a staple of the suiboku ink tradition of Sesshū and Hakuin, and it constitutes one of his most successful syntheses of his two principal cultural commitments: the European academic tradition of Laurens and the Chinese-Buddhist scholarship that would culminate in the Calligraphy Museum.