“Understanding grasses to use as medicine; cutting trees in order to plow; teaching how to cook using fire; teaching the benefits of strange beasts—A virtuous man of great scholarship and healing.”¹

Once again, Hakuin has reached outside the traditional pantheon of Buddhism for a subject that would have been familiar and popular with laypeople: the medicine god Shinnō, who originated in China but was incorporated into the Japanese Shinto religion. He is often depicted as he is here, in a robe made of grasses with leopard-skin sleeves and carrying a staff. The small horns that sprout from his head are a standard part of his iconography and indicate that the wise man is a chimera of a human and a goat or an ox.

—Bradley Bailey