Talking Pictures: The Life of Xuanzang in a Fourteenth Century Japanese Handscroll

Abstract

Paintings can be powerful in many ways. In some transcendent beauty, extreme size, exquisite workmanship, or supreme originality may induce awe in viewers. Others have reputations that precede them and do not even need to be viewed to be effective. The fourteenth-century illustrated handscrolls known as Genjō Sanzō-e (Illustrated Life of Xuanzang), kept closeted within the great temple of Kōfukuji in Nara for much of their history, had such a reputation as early as the fifteenth century. However, their power was not confined to their cultural or political currency. This set of twelve scrolls of inscribed texts and paintings depicting the historical sixteen-year journey of the Chinese monk Xuanzang (c.602–664) to India to retrieve Buddhist scriptures for translation into Chinese, is a landmark work of sophistication and painterly refinement. This article focuses on the orchestration of word-image interaction in these handscrolls. It attempts analysis of certain technical elements while keeping in mind both the overall narrative cohesion internal to the scrolls, and the ‘external’ narrative of the life and afterlives of the scrolls as significant objects in the religio-political landscape in which they were commissioned and preserved.