Page of a Pilgrim’s Visiting Album

Page of a Pilgrim’s Visiting Album

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

These album pages (14.140.2, .3) are two from a group of three that must at one point have belonged to a larger number, likely owned by a resident of Edo (Tokyo). Each of the three has a cover with multiple textile pieces, some of which may have come from Kan’eiji, a Tendai School temple in the Ueno area of Edo, for they bear the Dharma names of either the fourth or the tenth Tokugawa shogun, both of whom had their graves at the temple. The one shown here has the name of the tenth shogun, “Shunmei’in dono” (Tokugawa Ieharu, 1737–1786). The other page (14.140.3), which has a similar cover, is pasted with a small painting of the Buddha Amida (Sanskrit: Amitābha) bordered with golden characters spelling out “Hail the name of Amida Buddha,” as well as an image of the bodhisattva Kannon (Sanskrit: Avalokiteshvara) and a paper slip also reading “Hail the name of Amida Buddha.” The pages’ owner would have obtained these small images on temple visits.

Asian Art

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Page of a Pilgrim’s Visiting AlbumPage of a Pilgrim’s Visiting AlbumPage of a Pilgrim’s Visiting AlbumPage of a Pilgrim’s Visiting AlbumPage of a Pilgrim’s Visiting Album

The Met's collection of Asian art—more than 35,000 objects, ranging in date from the third millennium B.C. to the twenty-first century—is one of the largest and most comprehensive in the world. Each of the many civilizations of Asia is represented by outstanding works, providing an unrivaled experience of the artistic traditions of nearly half the world.