Budai (late 1400s): Art, History and Details

Budai (late 1400s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Jonan Etetsu (Japanese, 1444–1507).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

The Zen monk Jonan Etetsu is recorded as the 183rd abbot of Tō fuku-ji temple in the eastern hills of Kyoto, one of the earliest and most influential Zen institutions in medieval Japan. Otherwise, the only biographical information known to date has been gleaned from a few inscriptions on paintings documenting his friendship with another eminent monk, Ryō ’an Keigo (1425–1514), and two paintings bearing Jonan’s own poetic inscriptions. This image of Hotei (Chinese: Budai), a legendary, 10th-century Chan (Zen) monk, is one of those paintings. In Japan the image of the mirthful, pot-bellied Hotei enjoyed great popularity from the 14th century onward. Zen literature and popular folklore merged to create a storehouse of attractive fiction concerning this delightful character’s worldly adventures as a kind of itinerant Santa Claus and more symbolically as the future Buddha, Miroku, in disguise. For the Japanese, Hotei came to represent an unfettered path to spiritual enlightenment. The identity of the artist of this painting is unknown, although it may have been Etetsu, who attained a high rank within the 15th-century Zen community.

Object facts

• Title: Budai
• Date: late 1400s
• Creator attribution: Jonan Etetsu (Japanese, 1444–1507)
• Culture: Japan, Muromachi period (1392–1573)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: hanging scroll; ink on paper
• Dimensions: Painting: 51 x 24.8 cm (20 1/16 x 9 3/4 in.); Mounted with knobs: 132.1 x 41.7 cm (52 x 16 7/16 in.)
• Collection: ASIAN - Hanging scroll
• Department: Japanese Art
• Accession number: 1988.17

Collection credit

Mr. and Mrs. William H. Marlatt Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Nakamura, Tanio. "Etetsu hitsu, Rafuku zu." Kobijutsu 古美術, no. 40 (March 1973).
• “The Year in Review for 1988.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 76, no. 2 (February 1989): 30–75.
• Grossman, Nancy, James T. Ulak, Marjorie Williams, and Laurence Channing. Art of Japan: Masterpieces from the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2005.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.