“A Daruma is made of piled-up snow—as the days pass, he disappears, but where did he go?”¹

This charming and playful Daruma is actually an image of subtle profundity, incorporating a vernacular image into the Zen pantheon: the snowman, which in Japanese is literally called a yuki-daruma or “snow Daruma.” By painting a snowman instead of the traditional portrait of the Zen patriarch, Nantenbō expounds upon the concepts of transience and death using a familiar form. The inscription on this work quotes the Zen calligrapher Yamaoka Tesshū and encourages us to accept the rhythms of life, for, like snow melting in the warm sun, they are both completely natural and entirely outside our control.

 

—Bradley Bailey