Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art

About this Work

Sengai Gibon was a Rinzai Zen Buddhist monk revered for his wisdom, eccentricity, and
egalitarianism. At the age of thirty-nine, he became the 123rd abbot of Japan’s earliest Zen
temple, Shōfuku-ji. Although his primary focus was on Zen spiritual life and he had no formal artistic training, Sengai was a prolific ink painter and calligrapher.

Considered one of the most prominent monk-painters of the Edo period (1603–1868),
Sengai had a tendency to depict traditional Zen themes in unconventional ways, reflecting later developments in the ink painting tradition. In this deceptively simple, lighthearted painting of chrysanthemums, a few flowers are entangled with stray strands of grass. The calligraphed poem plays with gentle humor on the word for chrysanthemum, kiku, a homophone for the verb kiku, meaning to hear:
Even though
the flower has no ears
it is called kiku.