Section of the Dream Diary with a Sketch of Mountains

Koben is better known by his monastic nickname Myōe(bō), often followed by the honorific Shōnin (saint).[1] Today he is celebrated for his role in reviving the older teachings of the Flower Garland Sutra (Kegongyō), which had flourished at Tōdaiji in Nara from the middle of the eighth century. He also excelled at Esoteric Shingon practices, especially those of healing. Myōe stressed the importance of vow taking by the laity, and he gained notoriety for his criticism of Hōnen (1133–1212), later revered as the founder of Pure Land teachings in Japan.

Myōe's extraordinary talents, especially his remarkable predilection for dreaming or seeing visions, were well recognized during his lifetime. From the 1190s to his death in 1232, Myōe kept records of his dreams, collectively titled Yumenoki (Dream Record). After the saint's death his many followers recorded every detail of his life, his sayings and lectures, his poems, and the history of his temple, Kōzanji, which he founded in 1206. Over the last thirty years, as these eyewitness hagiographies and Kōzanji's voluminous collection of primary documents and early manuscripts have been cata­ logued, annotated, interpreted, and published, the life of Myōe has come into ever sharper focus.[2]

The most fateful event of Myōe's career took place in the winter of 1203, when the saint was thirty-one.[3] Trained by prominent teachers at Jingoji and Ninnaji in Kyoto and at Tōdaiji in Nara, Myōe had spent the previous eight years of his life trying to establish himself. As a member of the Yuasa family, a powerful warrior clan in Kii province (Wakayama prefecture), Myōe could hardly be unaffected by the military conflicts and shifting political alliances of his era. After the death in 1199 of Japan's first shogun, Minamoto Yoritomo, Jingoji and Myōe's family suffered the loss of income and property rights, a situation that persisted for several years.[4] Nonetheless, members of Myōe's family provided him with a succession of retreats in the mountains along the Arida River, where he immersed himself in scholarship.

For Myōe it was a time of hopelessness, fueled by an intense regret that he had been born too late, in a far distant land, to meet his beloved spiritual father Shakyamuni, the Historical Buddha. Seeing no future in Japan, Myōe made plans to travel to India in order to visit sacred sites. One day the young wife of his maternal uncle, Yuasa Munemitsu (before 1175–after 1238), became possessed by the Great­ Illuminating Deity (Daimyōjin) of the Kasuga Shrine. The oracles she delivered to Myōe caused him to abandon his travel plans and to decide to establish a temple near the capital. During the next three years Myōe spread the word of this miraculous oracle and eventually gained imperial support for the founding of Kōzanji as a Kegon subtemple of Jingoji. Myōe's devotion to the Kasuga deity is the focus of this fragment of the Dream Record. The text, written in five lines of mixed Chinese characters and katakana, should not be mistaken for an inscription on the painting of mountains that otherwise occupies so much space since this single sheet of paper might, in fact, originally have been part of a longer handscroll recording many more dreams. The text reads as follows:

Same month, twenty-first day. I went from the capital to the mountain. That night I had the following dream: the Itono Guards Captain invited Gedatsubō for a visit. He arrived on the night of the fifth, and wanted to leave after one day. I, Joben, thought he must be the Great Deity. But my heart tells me, if he is the Great Deity he should be bigger. Then I took Gedatsu's long cane and measured him as two feet, one inch. His human form is so marvelous it penetrates my heart. I said to myself, without a doubt he is the Great Deity.[5]

In this fragment Myōe calls himself Jōben ("becoming articulate"), a name he used until the seventh month of 1210 when he changed his name to Kōben. Thus this name change narrows the dating of this fragment to the period 1203–10.

The two people named in the dream were both important to Myōe during this period. "Itono Guards Captain" refers to Yuasa Munemitsu, who had acquired his military rank serving the powerful Minamoto family in the 1180s. A year after Munemitsu's wife delivered the Kasuga deity's oracles (in 1204) Myōe held a lecture-ceremony in honor of
the deity at Itono,site of Munemitsu's primary residence and one of Myōe's retreat.[6] The second name, Gedatsubō, refers to the prominent cleric Jōkei (1155–1213), a member of the Fujiwara clan who was then living in reclusion on Mount Kasagi on the Kizu River southeast of Kyoto. According to records of Myōe's encounters with the Kasuga deity, after receiving the oracles Myōe paid visits to the Kasuga Shrine in Nara and then to Gedatsu on Mount Kasagi. Myōe and Gedatsu had much in common besides their desire for reclusion, as both were devoted to Shakyamuni. They regarded the Kasuga deity as a "manifest trace" (suijaku) of Shakyamuni, and both invited the deity to guardian shrines within their temple grounds.[7] Myōe and Gedatsu corresponded, but there is no record of Gedatsu actually visiting either Myōe or Yuasa Munemitsu.

Several scholars have identified the mountains in the drawing as Mount Kasagi, site of Gedatsu's mountain retreat.[8] But since Kasagi is not mentioned in the dream, and since it is Gedatsu who left Kasagi to visit Itono, we should consider two other possibilities. The phrase ''went to the mountain" alludes to the Takao-Toganoo mountain ridges northwest of the capital where Jingoji and Kōzanji are located. The second "mountain" implied by the dream could be the natural embodiment of the Kasuga deity located behind the Kasuga Shrine. The drawing sketches two groups of mountains, with the foreground hills aligned diagonally toward the three peaks in the dis tance. At the place where the two forested slopes come together, a few lines and clusters of triangular­ shaped dots stand out among the surrounding trees. Perhaps this detail represents a clearing at Takao or Toganoo where Myōe placed paper offerings (gohei) of worship to the distant Kasuga deity, represented by the three peaks in the background.

Myōe wrote his Dream Record in a variety of formats: books, scrolls, scraps of paper, even in inscriptions on manuscripts. The primarily Chinese text is brushed in an angular, left-leaning running script (gyōsho). He consistently used a firm touch, loading his brush with ink and then letting it thin out to pale gray strokes. After having learned to write under his family's tutelage in Kii province and at Jingoji, Myōe developed an abbreviated utilitarian script that suited his prodigious sutra-copying efforts. While Myōe's idiosyncratic hand would never be mistaken for the elegant writing of an aris­ tocratic calligrapher of the capital, its power and austerity reward prolonged viewing. Because he kept the Dream Record for his own use, lines of text frequently run close together, as if he wished to save paper. He occasionally made corrections and some- times wrote variant versions of his dreams.

Ex coll.: Chokai Seiji; Shirasu Masako
Literature: Shirasu 1967, fig. 29;
Shirasu 1974, p. 189; Shimizu and Rosenfield 1984–85, pp. 61–63; Girard 1990, p. 168

Karen L. Brock. In Miyeko Murase, The Written Image. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2002, cat. no. 27.

[1] Bō is an honorific for monks and nuns that literally refers to their living quarters and is a component of their monastic names. Myōebō means "room of bright wisdom". The term Shōnin was reserved for monks of extraordinary wisdom or charismatic powers or who were perceived as being exception­ ally like the Historical Buddha.
[2] Kōzanji shiryō 1968– ; Okuda 1978; Girard 1990; Tanabe, G. 1992.
[3] Brock 2001.
[4] Matsumoto 1979.
[5] Girard 1990, p. 168.
[6] A chronology of Myōe's activities appears in Okuda 1978, pp. 305–16.
[7] Morrell 1987, pp. 44–88; Tyler 1990, pp. 258–84; Grapard 1992.
[8] Shimizu and Rosenfield 1984–85, pp. 61–63

Sylvan Barnet and William Burto , Cambridge, MA (until 2014; donated to MMA).

New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "The Written Image: Japanese Calligraphy and Paintings from the Sylvan Barnet and William Burto Collection," October 1, 2002–March 2, 2003.