Sacred Name of Tenjin (1500s): Art, History and Details

Sacred Name of Tenjin (1500s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Sakugen Shūryō (Japanese, 1501–1579).

The work and its context

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

The story emerged in the early 1300s that the kami Tenjin had traveled to China and achieved enlightenment under a famous Buddhist meditation master. Paintings of the subject as well as written invocations of Tenjin’s name were highly valued by the monks of Japan’s Zen Buddhist communities, to which an invocation of Tenjin’s name brushed by Zen monk Sakugen Shūryō attests. Sakugen was both a poet and an official envoy to Ming China in the 1500s. Creating calligraphies of deities’ names was akin to painting religious icons.

Object facts

• Title: Sacred Name of Tenjin
• Date: 1500s
• Creator attribution: Sakugen Shūryō (Japanese, 1501–1579)
• Culture: Japan, Muromachi period (1392–1573)
• Type: Calligraphy
• Technique: hanging scroll; ink on paper
• Dimensions: Overall: 105.4 x 18.4 cm (41 1/2 x 7 1/4 in.)
• Collection: ASIAN - Hanging scroll
• Department: Japanese Art
• Accession number: 2015.508

Collection credit

Gift from the Collection of George Gund III

Further reading listed by the museum

• Vilbar, Sinéad, and Kevin Gray Carr. Shinto: Discovery of the Divine in Japanese Art. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2019.

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.