Lot Essay
Shown here in bird's-eye view are the Kasuga Shrine and the Kofuku-ji temple in Nara, both founded by the powerful Fujiwara family. The pilgrim enters the verdant landscape panorama through a red torii, the gate that signals the entrance to a Shinto site, at the bottom center edge, and follows a path that leads upward across several bridges towards the two sacred mountains above, Mount Mikasa and Mount Kasuga. Cherry blossoms are in bloom.
The Kasuga Shrine houses five Shinto deities associated with the origin and rise of the Fujiwara family. At the upper left is a walled compound with four adjoining small shrines. To the right, at a distance from this compound, is the shrine of the fifth of the principal deities of the Kasuga cult, Kasuga Wakamiya.
With the growing interaction of Buddhism and Shinto in the Heian period, Buddhist and Shinto deities were equated as manifestations of a single truth, hence the inclusion of Kofuku-ji and its pagodas in the lower left foreground and a line of five Buddhist divinities at the top of the painting. Only one dated Kasuga Mandala is known; it was inscribed by the Emperor Kameyama in 1300.
By the late twelfth century Kasuga Shrine, with its delicate red, white and green corridors and gates, looked much as it does today. Historian Susan Tyler notes that it looks like a Pure Land palace in a painting, and that the landscape itself is clearly an iconic map of a sacred realm (Susan C. Tyler, The Cult of Kasuga Seen Through its Art [Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, The University of Michigan, 1992], pp.117-19.)
The cult of Kasuga Shrine spread to the provinces by the end of the twelfth century and its devotees required paintings for worship. It is thought that the many surviving shrine mandalas were painted by artists in an atelier on the Kofuku-ji compound. Other early examples of Kasuga mandala paintings in Western collections can be found in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Mary and Jackson Burke Foundation, the John and Kimiko Powers Collection, the Museum für Ostasiatische Kunst, Staatliche Museem Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin, and a private collection in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The Kasuga Shrine houses five Shinto deities associated with the origin and rise of the Fujiwara family. At the upper left is a walled compound with four adjoining small shrines. To the right, at a distance from this compound, is the shrine of the fifth of the principal deities of the Kasuga cult, Kasuga Wakamiya.
With the growing interaction of Buddhism and Shinto in the Heian period, Buddhist and Shinto deities were equated as manifestations of a single truth, hence the inclusion of Kofuku-ji and its pagodas in the lower left foreground and a line of five Buddhist divinities at the top of the painting. Only one dated Kasuga Mandala is known; it was inscribed by the Emperor Kameyama in 1300.
By the late twelfth century Kasuga Shrine, with its delicate red, white and green corridors and gates, looked much as it does today. Historian Susan Tyler notes that it looks like a Pure Land palace in a painting, and that the landscape itself is clearly an iconic map of a sacred realm (Susan C. Tyler, The Cult of Kasuga Seen Through its Art [Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, The University of Michigan, 1992], pp.117-19.)
The cult of Kasuga Shrine spread to the provinces by the end of the twelfth century and its devotees required paintings for worship. It is thought that the many surviving shrine mandalas were painted by artists in an atelier on the Kofuku-ji compound. Other early examples of Kasuga mandala paintings in Western collections can be found in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Mary and Jackson Burke Foundation, the John and Kimiko Powers Collection, the Museum für Ostasiatische Kunst, Staatliche Museem Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin, and a private collection in Cambridge, Massachusetts.