Artworks

Standing Yakushi, Jingoji

Artwork · Anonymous · c. 793 · sculpture · Jingo-ji Temple

Probably the main image of Jinganji, the temple vowed by Wake no Kiyomaro and completed by 793, moved to Jingoji on Mount Takao in 824, where Kūkai held the first Shingon initiation (kanjō) in Japan in 812, for Saichō among others. The healing Buddha is life-size and heavy-set, the drapery cut in deep folds; he holds a medicine jar in his left hand and makes the fear-not gesture with his right. The left shoulder is slightly higher, so that he seems to turn, and his heavy features give him a brooding, strange presence. Carved from a single block of hinoki wood (ichiboku-zukuri) without hollowing, so that cracks have formed; traces of paint remain on lips, eyes and curls. An austere statement of religious renewal in the tradition of Indian and Chinese plain-wood sculpture. 1 Mason 2005, p. 133, fig. 160. ↩ Literatur Mason 2005: Penelope E. Mason, History of Japanese Art, 2nd, Pearson Education LTD. 2005.