Taima Mandala (early 1300s): Art, History and Details

Taima Mandala (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 painting is a copy after an 8th-century woven mandala belonging to the temple Taimadera. The composition is based on a sacred text that describes the Buddha Shakyamuni’s explanation of Amida’s Pure Land to Queen Vaidehi, as well as his instructions to her on visual meditation upon the Pure Land. The Pure Land appears at the center of the painting. To the left is the story of Queen Vaidehi’s encounter with Shakyamuni, and to the right are the scenes she is given to visualize. The bottom illustrates the nine levels of birth that can be attained in the Pure Land.

Object facts

• Title: Taima Mandala
• Date: early 1300s
• Culture: Japan, Kamakura period (1185–1333)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: hanging scroll; ink, color, and gold on silk
• Dimensions: Painting: 135.6 x 140.3 cm (53 3/8 x 55 1/4 in.); Mounted: 170.5 x 203.2 cm (67 1/8 x 80 in.)
• Collection: ASIAN - Hanging scroll
• Department: Japanese Art
• Accession number: 1990.82

Collection credit

Severance and Greta Millikin Purchase Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Cunningham, Michael R. "Notable Acquisitions." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 78, no. 3 (1991): 63–147.
• Grotennuis, Elizabeth Ten. "Visions of a Transcendent Realm: Pure Land Images in the Cleveland Museum of Art." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 78, no. 7 (1991): 274–300.
• Cunningham, Michael R. Masterworks of Asian art. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1998.

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.