Portrait of Jianzhen

Although the subject of this portrait of a seated Buddhist priest is not recorded, the image's similarity to earlier works makes him identifiable as the Chinese priest Jianzhen (688–763), an important figure in the early history of Buddhism in Japan. Jianzhen, who was blind, hailed from the city of Yangzhou, a major cosmopolitan center and economic powerhouse in Tang-dynasty China. After receiving early training at the temple Dayunsi in Yangzhou, he moved to the Tang capital, Chang'an (now Xi'an), and later to Luoyang, before returning home to Yangzhou where in 742 he received an invitation from two Japanese priests to visit the Japanese capital at Nara. He spent the next decade trying and failing multiple times to make the journey to Japan, where he is known as Ganjin, before successfully arriving in Kyūshū and later Nara in 753. Later that decade he established the temple Tōshōdaiji in Nara and made it the headquarters of the newly established Ritsu sect. This portrait adheres closely to a famous eighth-century dry lacquer sculpture of Jianzhen installed at Tōshōdaiji that is the earliest extant example in Japan of a portrait sculpture and a designated National Treasure. Here Jianzhen is shown seated in meditation on a platform before a trifold screen bearing anachronistic ink paintings of landscapes and geese on a sandbar, typical not of the eighth century but of the Muromachi period, when this portrait was created.