“Trainee monks of the four seas, their bowls resounding like thunder and wearing straw hats, [come and] go to transform the village.—The 85-year-old fellow Nantenbō”¹

Unlike most of Nantenbō’s other images of similar proces­sions, this painting features on a single scroll two lines of monks, one entering a village and the other leaving it. The painter seems to imply the constancy of begging Zen monks engaging in this long-standing monastic tradition. Nantenbō painted this work in his old age, as the inscription states, and he suggests that the monks’ transformative acts of devotion will continue even after his death, as the transmission of the dharma is a collective project that transcends the actions of any singular monk.

 

—Bradley Bailey