Monju with Five Hair Knots (late 1200s–early 1300s): Art, History and Details

Monju with Five Hair Knots (late 1200s–early 1300s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

This Buddhist painting shows Monju, Manjushri in Sanskrit, riding a lion. Monju is a bodhisattva, a being who, though enlightened, chooses not to become a Buddha but instead helps others achieve enlightenment. Monju’s youthfulness symbolizes his pure wisdom, unsullied by the world, and his five hair knots represent his vow to keep calamity at bay. The supernatural nature of his lion is emphasized by its hair, every strand painted in gold, as well as by the lotus platforms beneath each of its feet. The boy’s bejeweled body and silk finery is meant to resemble that of an Indian prince.

Object facts

• Title: Monju with Five Hair Knots
• Date: late 1200s–early 1300s
• Culture: Japan, Kamakura period (1185–1333)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: Hanging scroll; ink, color, gold, and cut gold on silk
• Dimensions: Overall: 102 x 42.6 cm (40 3/16 x 16 3/4 in.); with knobs: 190.5 x 65.5 cm (75 x 25 13/16 in.)
• Collection: ASIAN - Hanging scroll
• Department: Japanese Art
• Accession number: 1971.21

A detail from the museum

This painting is exemplary of the Kamakura period, known for artworks with special attention paid to the realism of images.

Collection credit

Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Kawasaki Shōzō 川崎正藏, and Yoshitarō Kawasaki 川崎芳太郎. Chōshunkaku kanshō [長春閣鑑賞 = Catalogue of Chinese and Japanese art in the collection of Baron Kawasaki]. Tōkyō: Kokkasha, 1914.
• Lee, Sherman E. “The Year in Review for 1971.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 59, no. 1 (1972): 3–47.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1978. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1978.

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.