For the first time in 120 years, the 30 scroll paintings by Ito Jakuchu (1716-1800) known as "The Colorful Realm of Living Beings" are being shown together with the "Sakyamuni Triad" — three hanging scroll paintings of a central Buddha and two attendant bodhisattvas — at the Shokokuji Temple in Kyoto.
Starting in his 40s, the two sets took Jakuchu some 10 years to complete. He then gave all 33 paintings to the Shokokuji Temple as a offering for the salvation of himself and his family members. The 30 scrolls of "The Colorful Realm of Living Beings" were presented to the Imperial Family in 1889, and are now usually housed in the Sannomaru Shozokan Museum in the grounds of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, while the "Triad" paintings are kept at Shokokuji. The current exhibition is an extraordinary reunion organized to commemorate the 600th anniversary of the death of the temple's founder, the third Ashikaga Shogun, Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, and is probably the last opportunity to see the paintings all together due to logisitic complications.
The Buddhist triptych shows the Buddha Sakyamuni flanked on one side by Manjusri, the Bodhisattva of keen awareness and wisdom, seated on a lion, and Samantabhadra, the Bodhisattva of universal virtue, seated on an elephant, all in rich colors and gold. They look very different from most Japanese images of Buddhist subjects, and were almost certainly inspired by Korean paintings extant at the time in one of the temples of Kyoto or Nara. One such Korean painting dating from the Koryo Period (918-1392) that has surfaced in recent years was most likely the prototype for Jakuchu's central picture of Sakyamuni Buddha. It is now in the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art.