Merciful Mother

“Merciful Mother Kannon (1888) by Kano Hògai (1828-1888) is today one of the most familiar paintings in modern Japanese art history, known both for its status as an early example of nihonga, or modern Japanese-style painting, and for the debates surrounding its production and iconography. The painting, which depicts the bodhisattva Kannon (Sanskrit: Avalokitesvara) with an infant inside a spherical form, has provoked numerous inquiries into its sources and subject matter.

Is Hògai's Kannon-and-child image an original, or does it follow Buddhist precedents? …

Hògai is said to have painted Merciful Mother Kannon in the offices used by the school in advance of its formal opening, but he died unexpectedly in November 1888, four months before the first group of admitted students arrived. Merciful Mother Kannon and its associated preparatory drawings and sketches entered the school's collection…

Merciful Mother Kannon and its author underwent step-by-step promotion and memorialization to the effect that the painting appears to have entered the Japanese art historical canon almost at the moment it was made. …

In Merciful Mother Kannon, the bodhisattva is pictured against a plain silk ground layered with gold dust and pigment. Richly adorned, he - to use the male pronoun traditionally ascribed to bodhisattvas - holds the standard attributes of the willow branch and water dropper and stands with each foot planted on a lotus pedestal. At his feet an infant crouches in a radiant sphere. Both figures are suspended amid clouds in a celestial environment above mountain peaks.

Kannon's gaze is directed downward, while the infant raises its head upward and looks back, open-mouthed, in the bodhisattva's direction. The bright underside of the spherical enclosure gleams opposite the menacing crags at lower left. The child's red scarf exits the sphere and plumbs the abyss, while bubbles fall from the wavelike pedestal. With its pointing scarves and interlocking gazes, Merciful Mother Kannon concentrates on a single point in time, a seminal moment: the white liquid from the dropper has just penetrated the sphere's inner nimbus.

Already in the early twentieth century, Japanese viewers began to note Merciful Mother Kannon’s relation to Chinese, Korean, and Japanese Buddhist icons of Avalokitesvara with a child or children at his feet."…

Hògai's painting magnifies the gender indeterminacy typical of Avalokitesvara representations in East Asia by deploying additional gender symbols. As in many pre-modern images of the bodhisattva, Kannon’s mustache, beard, and fiat chest are accompanied by feminine traits such as rounded shoulders, long hair, and plump forearms. Beyond this, masculine signifies are also found in the upended water dropper and the metal ornament suspended below the bodhisattva's waist. Meanwhile, the infant is encircled by a womblike sphere, its organic inner membrane veined with fine lines. This reinforces the feminine aspects of the figure's identity.

Canonical Buddhist texts such as the Lotus and Flower Garland Sutras present Avalokitesvara as a male princely figure, but East Asian images, tales, and devotional texts frequently portray him in ways that have been described as "feminine" or "feminized."

The Lotus Sutra facilitated this development by expounding Avalokitesvara's capacity for body transformation. It provided storytellers with the scriptural grounds to construct alternative female identities for the bodhisattva without completely subverting the "textual" supremacy of his masculine identity, which reflected women's subordinate position in the Buddhist spiritual hierarchy. Guanyin could appear as a virtuous maiden or a seductive fish vendor with sutras hidden in her basket, allowing the bodhisattva's masculine, scriptural identity to remain intact even as local storytellers reconceptualized her as a heroine.

Over time, these stories and worship practices were joined by new, indigenous Chinese pictorial iconographies such as that of the Child-Granting Guanyin (Songzi Guanyin), which shows the bodhisattva accompanied by a small child or infant, This manifestation has its roots in the Lotus Sutra, which explains Avalokitesvara's capacity to grant a child of either sex to the devotee…

The reestablishment of Christian missions in Meiji Japan, moreover, led to the unveiling of groups of "hidden Christians" (kakure kirishitan) who had practiced in secret during the Tokugawa era (1600-1868). Among their items of worship were "Maria Kannon" statuettes, typically white ceramic or ivory figures that had been produced in southern China and contained familiar iconographic elements of Avalokitesvara in East Asia: feminine or sexually ambiguous facial and body features, a headpiece containing a small image of the Buddha, a white robe, and a willow branch. The child depicted in the figure's lap reflected the Chinese tradition of Child-Granting Guanyin but could also be interpreted as the child Jesus in the lap of his mother, Mary; in images found among the hidden Christians, the child is occasionally broken or obliterated in an apparent attempt to conceal or deny the figure's Christian identity…

Returning to Merciful Mother Kannon, it is apparent that far beyond its citation of a number of formal precedents, the painting also alludes to the entire scope of Avalokitesvara's interpretative history, a history in which the bodhisattva's femininity and comparison to the Virgin Mary were possible though not necessarily explicit. Conceived and produced in Japan during the 1880s, a time of intense debate about the preferability of all aspects of Western culture, including Christianity, Hògai's painting can now be seen to rely on for its effectiveness - indeed, to require - a certain ambiguity of styles, motives, and sources. Like the Maria Kannon figurines, Merciful Mother Kannon appeals to those who wish to see it as heir to the purely Buddhist tradition of Avalokitesvara shown with a child attendant or a child granted to the devotee, while at the same time it offers the possibility of a mixed or syncretic identity - albeit one where "the West" is clearly subordinated to "Japan" - by appearing to harmonize within itself Buddhism and Christianity, male and female, native and foreign painting styles…

In the face of this challenge, the words that became the "official title, Hibo Kannon, compassionate or merciful mother Kannon, achieve a tenuous compromise between two ideal readings: that of the painting as wholly relative to the Buddhist tradition, and that of the painting as echoing a Western, Christian paradigm. Hibo Kannon harmonizes these two readings by means of a single myth in which the painting portrays the Buddhist analogue to Christian tradition: while the particulars are Asian, they bear a striking resemblance to Occidental models.

This uneasy compromise is exposed, nonetheless, when we attempt to translate the tide into English, alternately invoking and suppressing a Christian standard of comparison as we waver between "mercy" and "compassion," where the latter is commonly associated with Buddhist terms in the West. In other words, in order to avoid the Christian imposition of "mercy," many translators have elected to use the title Compassionate Mother Kannon or, more obliquely, Kannon as Compassionate Mother, The Compassionate Kannon, and so forth. Yet the translators' adherence to an appropriately Buddhist modifier can also be construed as an act dial naturalizes the painting's subject matter as a wholly Buddhist one and thereby maintains the central myth of its compatibility with, but innocence of, Christianity…

Master Hògai once said, "For human compassion, nothing compares to a mother's love for her child; Kannon is the Ideal Mother [risôieki no haha], the spirit of great compassion which generates and nourishes all things, the origin of all creation and divine manifestations; I have wanted to express this in a painting for many years, but until now I was unable to arrive at a suitable form [of expression]…"

Okakura addresses his Japanese audience: The painting is Hògai's last; he completed it just four days before taking his eternal rest. ... As those who have been to Rome will well recall, the Creation by Michelangelo is considered the authoritative masterpiece of European fine art. Full of strength, grand in composition- just look how the hand of God. . . stretches out toward the earth and instantly makes a full-grown man appear. . . . Since Buddhist principles of genesis naturally differ from those of Christian Creation, it follows that their respective artistic forms also differ. . . . Master Hògai's wondrous conception did not allow Michelangelo alone to dominate the pinnacle of artistic beauty!...”

~ Chelsea Foxtoell is assistant professor of Japáñese art and architecture at the University of Chicago. She is completing a book on Kano Hògai and the emergence of nihonga (Japanese-style painting) in the late nineteenth centwy [Department of Art Histoiy, University of Chicago, 5540 South Greenwood Avenue, Chicago, Ill. 60637, foxwell@uchic.ago.edu].

COPYRIGHT: Copyright College Art Association, Inc. Dec 2010.