The Heart Sutra, Second Series (Tsuikai shingyo-sho)
Tsuikai shingyo-sho
About This Series
Tsuikai shingyo-sho, here translated as The Heart Sutra, Second Series, is Shiko Munakata's second extended set of woodblock prints based on the Hannya Shingyo, the short Mahayana scripture on the perfection of wisdom that the artist treated repeatedly across his career as both text and image. Munakata regarded the Heart Sutra as the most concentrated of all Buddhist statements and the most natural subject for hanga, since its 262 Chinese characters could be set into cherry block as carved calligraphy and surrounded by figural and decorative imagery in the same medium. The second series, whose title tsuikai indicates a renewed engagement with the text, belongs to the postwar phase of his religious printmaking, after the wartime Two Bodhisattvas and Ten Great Disciples cycle had established him as Japan's preeminent Buddhist woodblock artist. Each sheet is carved directly into yamazakura cherry and printed in sumi on washi in the artist's ita-e manner, with several impressions completed by uragashin verso-coloring that allows mineral pigments to diffuse forward through the paper as pale tints behind the dense black line. The cycle combines passages of the sutra inscribed in Munakata's idiosyncratic seal-script calligraphy with figural images of bodhisattvas, lotus, and guardian deities, asserting the unity of word and image that the artist understood to be the founding principle of East Asian Buddhist book art. Impressions are documented in the Munakata Shiko Memorial Hall in Aomori, the National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo, the Museum of Modern Art New York, and other major institutional holdings of postwar Japanese hanga.
Prints in This Series (1)
Frequently Asked Questions
Tsuikai shingyo-sho, here translated as The Heart Sutra, Second Series, is Shiko Munakata's second extended set of woodblock prints based on the Hannya Shingyo, the short Mahayana scripture on the perfection of wisdom that the artist treated repeatedly across his career as both text and image. Munakata regarded the Heart Sutra as the most concentrated of all Buddhist statements and the most natural subject for hanga, since its 262 Chinese characters could be set into cherry block as carved calligraphy and surrounded by figural and decorative imagery in the same medium. The second series, whose title tsuikai indicates a renewed engagement with the text, belongs to the postwar phase of his religious printmaking, after the wartime Two Bodhisattvas and Ten Great Disciples cycle had established him as Japan's preeminent Buddhist woodblock artist. Each sheet is carved directly into yamazakura cherry and printed in sumi on washi in the artist's ita-e manner, with several impressions completed by uragashin verso-coloring that allows mineral pigments to diffuse forward through the paper as pale tints behind the dense black line. The cycle combines passages of the sutra inscribed in Munakata's idiosyncratic seal-script calligraphy with figural images of bodhisattvas, lotus, and guardian deities, asserting the unity of word and image that the artist understood to be the founding principle of East Asian Buddhist book art. Impressions are documented in the Munakata Shiko Memorial Hall in Aomori, the National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo, the Museum of Modern Art New York, and other major institutional holdings of postwar Japanese hanga.
The The Heart Sutra, Second Series (Tsuikai shingyo-sho) series contains 1 prints, created by Shiko Munakata.
The The Heart Sutra, Second Series (Tsuikai shingyo-sho) series was created by Shiko Munakata (棟方志功).
We currently have 1 of 1 known prints from the The Heart Sutra, Second Series (Tsuikai shingyo-sho) series indexed in our collection. Browse them all on this page.
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