Dainichi Nyorai (Enjō-ji)

[1][2][note 1] Unkei's next documented works, from the early 1180s, were commissioned by military leaders prominent in the ensuing Kamakura shogunate, for temples in eastern Japan.

[5][6] According to Kūkai, the founder of the Shingon school of Esoteric Buddhism in the early ninth century, "because the secret storehouse [Mikkyō teaching] is so profound and mysterious it is difficult to manifest with brush and ink [text].

[11] Unlike the other Buddhas, Dainichi Nyorai is typically depicted in the form of a bodhisattva, with the garments, adornments, and long hair of the nobility of ancient India.

The gesture also symbolizes the mystic union of the material with the spiritual of yoga practice, which in Tibet and Nepal takes the form of the ecstatic Yab-Yum embrace, but in China and Japan is sublimated in this mudrā.

[13][17][18] In the Brahma Net Sutra, translated into Chinese in 406 and copied and expounded on imperial orders through all the provinces in mid-eighth century Japan, Dainichi Nyorai appears seated on a lotus pedestal, around which all gather to hear his teaching of the law.

[44] The eyes are of rock crystal, inserted into the open sockets from inside and held in place by bamboo pins, with painted pupils.

[42][44][48] Eyes formed in this way seem to move in the guttering firelight of a temple and are one of the defining features of the sculpture of the Kamakura period that began a decade later.

[49] According to an inscription in black ink on the underside of the lotus heart of the pedestal, the statue was begun by Unkei, "true apprentice of great busshi Kōkei", on the twenty-fourth day of the eleventh month of 1175 and was completed on the nineteenth day of the tenth month of 1176; Unkei's fee was forty-three lengths of Hachijō-jima silk.

[44] At an uncertain date two panels were opened in the back of the head of the statue, either for repairs to the eyes or to enable the insertion of holy objects, as found in numerous other instances.