“When pine and plum trees are within the shrine, you don’t have to ask!”¹

One of Hakuin’s students, Reigen Etō continued his master’s tradition of incorporating subject matter from outside the pantheon of Buddhism into his Zen paintings. Here, he painted the gateway to a Shinto shrine for the god Tenjin, the patron deity of learning and scholarship, a subject also painted by Hakuin, from whom the inscription is also borrowed. The pine and plum trees are representative of Tenjin so, as the irreverent inscription states, there is no confusion about whose shrine it is. The convention of representing famed figures using only their attributes or accessories can be traced to early Buddhist paintings of cosmic diagrams.

 

—Bradley Bailey