Tenjin Traveling to China

The statesman-poet Sugawara Michizane (845–903) is shown here as Tenjin, the deified being he became in the wake of his unjust death in exile and the calamities his angry spirit inflicted upon the imperial court in Kyoto. After his deification, Michizane was revered as a god of agriculture and patron of the falsely accused. One guise in which he was often represented—and in which he appears in this painting—is that of “Totō Tenjin,” or Tenjin on his way to China to visit a Chan (Zen) Buddhist master. In this form he wears the garment of a Zen priest and a semi-transparent gauze hood, with a bag slung over his shoulder. Clutched beneath one arm is a branch of blossoming plum, the flower he is said to have loved and with which he is often associated. With the growth and expansion of Zen Buddhism in medieval Japan, the Totō Tenjin image became popular as part of the movement to accommodate Zen—imported from China around the 14th century—into Japan’s religious environment.

Tōsai was a Muromachi-period painter about whom little is known, other than that he was active in the latter part of the fifteenth century. However, this hanging scroll is important as an early example of paintings of this specific guise of the deity Tenjin.