Heike nōkyō (Sutras Dedicated by the Heike)
平家納経
Artwork · members of the Taira family · 1164 · sutra · Itsukushima Shrine
The most elaborate of the Lotus Sutra scrolls of the Insei period: thirty-three rolls copied, by tradition, by members of the Taira family and their vassals, from Taira no Kiyomori down, and presented by him to the clan’s shrine at Itsukushima in the ninth month of 1164. Each roll is made of lavishly decorated sheets with the text in gold and silver ink, the frontispieces traditionally attributed to the women of the clan. On the cover of chapter 27, the King Myōshōgon chapter, a huge silver moon rises behind a low hill and an old gnarled tree; ashide characters in the roots read “that long night” — the darkness of mappō before Miroku appears. 1 In 1602 Tawara Sōtatsu, then a fan painter, is first mentioned repairing the scrolls; he repainted motifs on the endpapers and added new paintings, such as a frontispiece of a gold deer bending to nibble grass on a silver slope. 2 Mason 2005, pp. 160–161, fig. 194. ↩ Ebd., p. 267, fig. 307. ↩ Literatur Mason 2005: Penelope E. Mason, History of Japanese Art, 2nd, Pearson Education LTD. 2005.