Three Laughers of Tiger Ravine

This painting captures the final moment of a legendary fourth-century encounter between three Chinese gentlemen—the Daoist master Lu Xiujing 陸修靜 (406–477), the Buddhist monk Huiyuan 慧遠 (334–416), and the poet Tao Qian 陶潜 (Tao Yuanming 陶淵明; 365–427). According to the legend, known as “Three Laughers of Tiger Ravine” (in Chinese Huxi sanxiao, and in Japanese Kokei sanshō), the monk Huiyuan, who had established the Pure Land Buddhist temple Donglinsi near the storied Lu Mountains in 386 and maintained a decades-old vow to never to leave the mountain temple, was enjoying the company of the Daoist Lu and Confucian Tao, fellow residents of the Lu Mountains area who were purported to be frequent visitors. As Huiyuan saw off his companions at the end of a long day of conversation and wine, the three wandered farther than expected, inadvertently crossing the bridge over Tiger Ravine, which marked the edge of Donglinsi’s sacred precincts. Realizing this, the three men broke out into laughter.

The legend of this encounter of three celebrated figures emerged during the Song Dynasty (960–1279) and advanced a syncretic view of China’s three main belief systems—Daoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism. It was introduced to Japan during the early Muromachi period (1392–1573), probably alongside Chinese paintings of the subject, and by the fifteenth century was a common pictorial subject associated with Japanese Zen Buddhism. During the sixteenth century, this and other Zen subjects were commonly depicted by professional painters, such as those of the Kano school. In the present example, painted late in the Muromachi period, the trio of figures standing before a bridge that spans a small creek occupies the lower half of the picture. The tonsured Huiyuan, at right, holds his hand to his head and gestures as if he’s just become aware of his transgression, while his companions laugh and point. Rocks and a wildly gnarled pine tree in the upper half of the picture hint at the landscape of the Lu Mountains.

Nothing is known about the biography of the artist, Sekishō Shōan, but the dozen or so extant works bearing his seals make clear his connection to the early Kano school of painters. Unlike the main line of Kano painters in Kyoto, however, Shōan seems to have been attached to a Kano studio in eastern Japan, specifically in the eastern castle town of Odawara, near the former administrative capital of Kamakura. Like other mid-sixteenth century painters aligned with the Odawara Kano studio—artists such as Maejima Sōyū and Uto Gyoshi—Sekishō Shōan’s extant works betray his familiarity both with works by the school’s second-generation head, Kano Motonobu (1476–1559), and with an older, local tradition of ink painting in eastern Japan.