Yuima

This painting of Yuima (Vimalakīrti), held in the Hakodate City Museum in Hokkaido and painted before Kanzan's death in 1930, addresses one of the most distinctive sage figures of Mahayana Buddhist literature. Vimalakīrti is the wealthy layman of Vaiśālī whose dialogues with Mañjuśrī occupy the eponymous Vimalakīrti Sūtra, a text of extraordinary importance in East Asian Buddhism for its insistence that the highest spiritual attainment is open to lay practitioners and not the exclusive province of the monastic order. The iconographic tradition, descending from the great Tang dynasty depictions and refined in the Japanese sets at Tōfukuji and Daitokuji, shows Yuima reclining or seated on a low couch, the body wrapped in robes and a fly-whisk or scroll in hand, gaunt with the illness through which he taught his most celebrated lessons. Kanzan's treatment is consistent with the wider program of Buddhist iconographic revival that Okakura Kakuzō and the early Nihon Bijutsuin had encouraged, in which the early-modern Kanō and Tosa lineages were redirected toward the classical Chinese and early-Japanese Buddhist tradition. The picture's residence in Hakodate, a port city with its own distinguished history of Buddhist patronage, reflects the wide regional reach of Kanzan's work during his Imperial Household Artist years from 1917 onwards. Within his oeuvre, the Yuima painting sits alongside the Yoroboshi screen and the early Manjushiri as a major statement of his lifelong devotion to Buddhist subject matter.