Picture Sutras

Speaking of sutras, while reading about the Heart Sutra in Japanese, I learned about an interesting trend in the late-medieval “Edo Period” (17th through 19th century) called eshin-kyō (絵心経), or “picture Heart Sutra”).

The idea was to make the Heart Sutra, a brief, but important and very popular Buddhist text, readable by illiterate peasants using a kind of rebus. The pictures above, to a native Japanese speaker of the time, would evoke certain words, which matched syllables of the sutra. For example, a few I can pick out:

• The demon-looking character is a Hannya (mentioned here), hence hannya.
• The pregnant woman with a baby is hara, as in a the torso.
• The five vertical lines is go as in the number five.
• The upright sword is ken.

This is just one example. It turns out that there’s many different versions, using slightly different pictures and styles. According to this blog, the origin of these picture sutras was a man named Zenpachi (善八). During the Genroku Period (mentioned here and on the other blog), a high-water mark of Japanese (especially Tokyo) culture, Zenpachi wanted to make Buddhist teachings easier for kids to understand and helped devise these pictures.

What’s interesting is that the tradition continues to this day, as seen in my Heart Sutra totebag my wife picked up.

This version is very cute, and of course has hiragana pronunciation guides just in case, but I think it’s a clever way to keep the Buddhist tradition alive.

P.S. moved this to Friday to make up for the accidental double-post on Tuesday and space the content out. We’ll be back to Monday-Thursday schedule starting next week.