Daruma

Daruma is a hanging-scroll painting by Tsuji Kakō in ink and color, dated to about 1917 and now in the Minneapolis Institute of Art (accession 2013.29.1134). Daruma — Bodhidharma, the legendary Indian monk who carried Chan/Zen Buddhism to China in the early sixth century — is among the most painted figures in the East Asian Zen tradition: depicted in red robes with hooded brow, half-closed eyes, and the long meditation that, according to legend, cost him his arms and legs and brought enlightenment. The genre of Daruma-zu descends through Mu Qi, Hakuin Ekaku, and the Edo-period Zen-painting tradition into the Meiji nihonga repertoire, where it served as both an iconographic obligation for senior painters and a vehicle for the rough, abbreviated brushwork associated with Zen practice. Kakō's treatment renders the patriarch with the kind of soft chromatic finish and careful observational portraiture that distinguishes Kyoto nihonga from earlier Zen ink painting, applying the Maruyama-Shijō habits of close drawing learned under his master Kōno Bairei to a subject that older Zen painters had treated more roughly. The scroll is one of the more frequently reproduced of his single-figure works and reflects his standing as a senior Kyoto nihonga painter equally comfortable across kachō-e, landscape, and Buddhist subject matter.