This written and illustrated page records a 13th-century Buddhist monk’s dream of meeting Buddha Shakyamuni.
Myōe Kōben, Dream Record (Yume no ki), early 13th century, ink on paper, 30.1 x 51 cm (Purchase–Charles Lang Freer Endowment, National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian Institution, F2013.1a–c). Speakers: Dr. Frank Feltens, Curator of Japanese Art, National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian Institution, and Dr. Beth Harris, Smarthistory
Join us as we examine one entry from a dream diary written by Japanese Buddhist monk Myōe Kōben, now mounted as a hanging scroll. In this video, we consider the contents of the dream scribed here, the pages’ visual characteristics, and the practice of religious dreaming.
0:00:06.6 Dr. Beth Harris: We’re in the storage room at the National Museum of Asian Art, and we’re looking at something really special. This is a record of a dream.
0:00:16.6 Dr. Frank Feltens: We’re looking at a page that records a dream by the 13th-century monk, Myōe. Myōe had this habit of recording his dreams, not every morning, but over the period of 40 years. He would get up in the morning, and the first thing, when he did have a dream that he wanted to record, he would grab his notebook and jot down the dream.
0:00:37.5 Dr. Beth Harris: And he was known for this among his contemporaries.
0:00:40.9 Dr. Frank Feltens: He became very famous for the practice of sleeping and channeling his faith into his dreams. We think of dreams as this unintentional thing that we don’t really have control over. But for Myōe, this type of religious dreaming was something that he affected himself. Through his meditation, he tried to channel his mind into the way of dreaming about religious matters.
0:01:04.0 Dr. Beth Harris: The dreams that he had could be very spiritually powerful. In the dream that he records here, he actually meets the historical Buddha.
0:01:13.3 Dr. Frank Feltens: That was really his intention. He wanted his dreams to be this communion with deities or with aspirational figures that would guide him in his practice and give him access to wisdom and knowledge that he otherwise wouldn’t be able to achieve. So what we are looking at is two pages of Myōe’s dream diary. The first page, reading from the right to the left, starts with the date of the dream and then records the specifics of the dream and ends on the next page with a few more lines. The calligraphy is very abbreviated and very fast, but it ends with this lone figure in this long cloak, round head carrying a staff. And then next to it is this bunch of boulders and what looks to be a pine tree. Dreaming, or religious dreaming, in this case, is a big part of Buddhist practice. So there are established methods on how to induce dreams like this. It was this state of being half awake, half sleeping. That was the most perfect time to actually have religious dreams.
0:02:16.2 Dr. Beth Harris: I’m also just thinking about the efficacy that his dreams had for the pursuit that was his life of achieving enlightenment. And so the dreams become a tool in that engagement.
0:02:28.3 Dr. Frank Feltens: Buddhism itself thought of the world around us as a dream, too, as something that is an illusion, basically. And piercing through that illusion was the point of the entire religious practice.
0:02:39.2 Dr. Beth Harris: Buddhism is sometimes described as a way of seeing the truth of reality.
0:02:44.2 Dr. Frank Feltens: It kind of inverts the idea of dreaming. If everything around us is dream, Myōe’s dream is the closest he is getting to understanding what actuality is really like.
0:02:56.7 Dr. Beth Harris: We have a sense of the writing, the calligraphy being very quick and actually becoming more quick as he writes from right to left and he runs out of ink and dips his brush again. And then this very quickly brushed image of this figure in a robe. I have a sense that his face is looking upward. The brushwork that’s so suggestive but is sort of also barely there in a way like a dream. It’s hard to make the words, when you’re describing a dream, match what you see. And so I feel like I understand that urge for him to quickly draw what he saw so that he could go back and maybe use that image to help him dream again.
0:03:38.0 Dr. Frank Feltens: And I think that is one of the purposes of Myōe’s recording of these dreams, to inspire other dreams that you want in the future. And in Myōe’s day-to-day routine, reading sutras, reading religious texts, meditating, everything was geared toward occupying the mind with these deities, but also with the ideas that they were connected with. So it was to me, not really surprising that he dreamt so much about Shakyamuni, for example, because he was thinking about him all the time.
0:04:06.8 Dr. Beth Harris: It is a piece of notebook paper, and it’s mounted here so beautifully on silk, but it also feels like a notebook paper. And we see some of the ink from the other pages coming through.
0:04:19.0 Dr. Frank Feltens: This is what’s so special about the fragment here at the National Museum of Asian Art is that it’s actually a page from the same kind of notebooks that Myōe did use and that are still preserved at Kōzan-ji in the collection at the temple where he practiced and where he recorded his dreams. Here in the middle of the work is this fold that was the outer edge of the book and the page. The paper is so thin, but the ink so heavy, that it just bled through and created this ghostly mirror image of his writings behind Shakyamuni’s figure. This had been preserved as a book for a really long period of time before it at some point was removed from its original notebook and then turned into this hanging scroll for contemplation.
