Nichiren's Nirvana

Narrative scrolls in a hanging format were often commissioned by Buddhist temples to commemorate the lives, deeds, and virtues of their patriarchs or describe sect and temple legends. This example describes the events surrounding the death and funeral of the monk Nichiren (1222–1282) and the establishment of his tomb near Mt. Fuji. Nichiren founded the Hokke or “Lotus” sect of Buddhism.

Nichiren’s death is visualized in the central, right-hand portion of the scroll. The monk, in a vignette reminiscent of standard pictures illustrating the Death of the Buddha, reclines on a raised platform and clasps a rosary and fan, while his disciples surround the platform in various attitudes of mourning. The funeral procession winds along the lower portion of the composition. Scenes of cremation and the collection of the patriarch’s ashes in an urn by his disciples follow at the upper left. Finally, the monk’s tomb, which is encircled by the six senior priests whom Nichiren personally chose as his successors, crowns the composition.

The scroll preserves certain elements of classical jamato-e (“Japanese-style”) painting, including the bird’s-eye distribution of scenes with intervening bands of mist and lyrical, softly rolling hills. But these features co-mingle with a quite different painting style: the figures in the procession recall the pioneering work of a late 17th–century master working in the new style of painting, called ukiyo-e (“pictures of the Floating World”), that celebrated the ephemeral secular worlds of the theatre and pleasure quarters.