Portrait of Shinran (1255, Senjuji)

Shinran spent much of his life as an itinerant teacher rather than a settled abbot, traveling through the countryside to preach the reliance on Amida Buddha's saving vow that would become the foundation of Jodo Shinshu. This 1255 portrait, painted when he was 83 years old and eight years before his death, shows him seated on an animal pelt, a detail easy to pass over but worth pausing on. Itinerant priests of the period carried such pelts precisely because they had no fixed place to teach from; a pelt could be unrolled anywhere, turning a roadside or a borrowed room into a seat of instruction on the spot.

Portraying an elderly, widely revered teacher on so plain and practical an object, rather than on an elaborate throne or dais, keeps his own history visible inside the image itself. Shinran had spent decades as a wandering teacher before the movement he began grew into an organized tradition with its own temples and institutional structure, and a portrait made near the end of his life, while he was still alive to see it, chose to remember that itinerant identity rather than replace it with the trappings of the settled religious authority his teaching would eventually acquire. The portrait keeps that memory intact for anyone who looks at it today, long after the teaching itself grew into an established religious institution with temples, ordained clergy and a settled place in Japanese religious life.

Jodo Shinshu did not stay a single organization after Shinran's death. Several branches trace their authority back to him, the well known Hongwanji lineages among them, but also smaller schools such as Takada, whose head temple, Senjuji in Mie Prefecture, holds this portrait today. That a specific Shinran likeness survives at one branch temple rather than at a Hongwanji institution is a reminder that Shinran belongs to the whole tradition his teaching produced, not to whichever branch happens to have grown largest.

Senjuji also holds a related image known as the Kagami no Goei, a title whose characters echo, with a slightly different reading, the traditional "Kagami no Miei" title given to a mirror portrait of Honen, the teacher under whom Shinran first studied Pure Land Buddhist practice before developing his own distinctive teaching. Both portraits were exhibited together at the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art in 2011, for Shinran's 750th memorial and the 40th anniversary of the Shinshu Buddhist Federation, an occasion that brought together material from across the tradition's several branches rather than favoring any single one. Displaying teacher and student side by side, under echoing titles, made visible in a single exhibition the lineage connecting them.