Lady Chiyono

This simply but deftly and sensitively painted figure of a young women who has just dropped a water bucket captures a moment from the medieval Japanese legend of Lady Chiyono, a woman of high birth who achieved Buddhist enlightenment when she saw the moon reflected in the spilled water. The master painter Maruyama Ōkyo, one of the most powerful and prolific painters in Kyoto of the eighteenth century, has left most of the composition blank, and has discarded an attempt to create a feeling of three-dimensionality through shading (though he had mastered a more realistic style of painting).



Lady Chiyono was the daughter of Adachi Yasumori 安達泰盛 (1231–1285), a prominent samurai who served as a governor of Mutsu (now the Tohoku region) during the time of the Kamakura Shōgunate. She also became the second wife of the Kanezawa Sanetoki金沢実時 (1224–1276), the great scholar who belonged the Hōjō clan, who served as regents to the Shogun.



After her husband's death, Chiyoni became a nun in Kyoto, where she diligently practiced Zen meditation but apparently made little progress towards spiritual enlightenment. Then, according to legend and as depicted in Ōkyo’s painting, one day she was bringing water back from the river in an old bucket, and noticed the reflection of the moon in it. Then all of a sudden the bottom of the bucket fell out, causing water to spill everywhere and dissolve the moon’s reflection. At that moment, Chiyono suddenly realized that all perceptions she had of reality and of herself were similarly insubstantial just like the reflection of the moon. And these ideas of herself were being held together by her own delusions, which were just as flimsy as her bucket. Her experience is immortalized in a famous waka (31-syllable poem) that anyone viewing this painting at the time it was made would have recalled the poem and religious incident, even without it being inscribed on the blank space of the painting:



In this way and that I tried to save the old pail
Since the bamboo strip was weakening and about to break
Until at last the bottom fell out.
No more water in the pail!
No more moon in the water!



(Trans. Paul Reps, Zen Flesh, Zen)



Incidentally, the biographies of Chiyono and the prominent nun Mugai Nyodai (b. 1223), founder of Keiaiji Temple, have been tangled up and confused over the centuries, even today, but it seems reasonable to assume that both shared the same given name as children, and then their biographers got things confused. It is common to see in biographical dictionaries that Mugai’s name as a child was Chiyono, and she was also listed as the he daughter of Adachi Yasumori. But Mugai Nyodai according to most accounts was supposedly born in 1223, so if her father was definitely born in 1231, then something is amiss in the recordkeeping.