The Eight Hosts of Deva, Naga, and Yakshi (1454): Art, History and Details

The Eight Hosts of Deva, Naga, and Yakshi (1454) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

The grandest of the Buddhist mortuary rites is the Water-Land (shuilu) ritual. This esoteric ceremony is conducted for the salvation of “all souls of the dead on land and sea.” The ostentatious ritual was performed for imperial ancestors and high officials from the Song (960–1279) to the Ming dynasties and drew large crowds. On the second day of the weeklong ceremony, paintings are hung in the inner altar. This scroll represents the Eight Hosts of Celestial Nagas and Yakshis as described in the Lotus Sutra. Together with CMA 1973.70.1, it belongs to a set of 36 Water-Land ritual paintings that are the finest works of their types known from the Ming period. With their bright, opaque color and fine-line gilt decoration intact and unfaded, both paintings share a remarkable state of preservation.

Object facts

• Title: The Eight Hosts of Deva, Naga, and Yakshi
• Date: 1454
• Culture: China, Ming dynasty (1368–1644)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: hanging scroll; ink and color on silk
• Dimensions: Painting: 140.2 x 78.8 cm (55 3/16 x 31 in.); Overall with knobs: 226.5 x 120 cm (89 3/16 x 47 1/4 in.)
• Collection: ASIAN - Hanging scroll
• Department: Chinese Art
• Accession number: 1973.70.2

A detail from the museum

The Naga is on the lower right dressed as a king with gold dragons on his blue robe.

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• “The Year in Review for 1973.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 61, no. 2 (February 1974): 31–78.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1978. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1978.
• Ho, Wai-kam, Sherman E. Lee, Laurence Sickman, and Marc F. Wilson. Eight Dynasties of Chinese Painting: The Collections of the Nelson Gallery-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, and the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art, in cooperation with Indiana University Press, 1980.

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.