After Hakuin: how the Daruma manner passed to Tōrei and Suiō

Hakuin Ekaku’s Zen-painting manner passed to his two principal Dharma heirs, Tōrei Enji (1721–1792) and Suiō Genro (1717–1789), the pair later called Hakuin’s “two divine legs”. Tōrei’s Daruma Facing a Cave Wall while Meditating at LACMA (M.2006.207) is a second-generation Hakuin-school Daruma: the master’s wall-gazing subject kept, the brush quieter and more even. The lineage carried a subject and a way of holding the brush, not a copybook — and it is the koan curriculum, reorganised by Hakuin and Tōrei, that the line actually transmitted.

What the lineage was actually carrying

The question this scroll forces is narrow and worth keeping narrow: when a Zen teacher’s painting manner passes to his heirs, what is it that passes? Not a copybook. The Hakuin school did not run a pattern repertory the way the Kano studio did. What it carried was a curriculum and a habit of hand, and the two were not separate things.

The two men who carried it are not interchangeable with Hakuin and should not be folded into him. Tōrei Enji (1721–1792) received Hakuin’s robe and stood as his principal Dharma heir; Suiō Genro (1717–1789) was the other senior heir, and later tradition paired the two as Hakuin’s “two divine legs.”¹ The substantive transmission between Hakuin and Tōrei was textual and institutional before it was painterly: the two reorganised the koan curriculum that every later Rinzai line still descends through, and Tōrei wrote it up in Shūmon mujintō ron, “The Undying Lamp of Zen.”² The painting manner travelled inside that, as one more thing a disciple absorbed by being in the room, not as a discipline taught from a model.

That is the correct frame for the scroll on this page. It is not Hakuin’s Daruma. It is what a principal heir did with Hakuin’s Daruma, and the difference between the two is the whole subject.

The object: Tōrei’s wall-facing Daruma

The hanging scroll at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (accession M.2006.207, Daruma Facing a Cave Wall while Meditating, ink on paper, 18th century) shows the figure from behind.³ This is the menpeki subject, Daruma turned to the wall, the same subject Hakuin used, here handled by the heir.

The figure is a hunched mound of robe. A few broad strokes give the back and the bowed head; the brush is loaded and wet, but it is laid down evenly, without the sudden thickening and starving that Hakuin’s contour runs through. There is no cave drawn. The wall is the unpainted paper to the figure’s front, and the composition trusts the viewer to read that emptiness as the wall, exactly as the menpeki subject requires. The image area is small, under 37 by 50 centimetres, mounted up to a full hanging scroll; this is a private devotional-scale object, not a temple-hall painting.³

What is worth noticing is the evenness. Hakuin’s late Daruma brush tends to bully the paper: the silhouette swells and thins inside a single stroke, and the eyes, when the figure is frontal, are pushed off-centre and back at the viewer. Tōrei’s wall-facer removes the eyes from the problem entirely by turning the figure away, and the contour is held at a more constant pressure. Read against the documented Hakuin Daruma manner, this is recognisably the same workshop habit run by a steadier, less combative hand.⁴ The comparison is the point; the value judgement is not. Tōrei is not failing to be Hakuin. He is doing the master’s subject in his own register, which is what a transmitted manner looks like when it is alive rather than copied.

What the catalogue does not settle

The LACMA record dates the scroll to the eighteenth century and does not narrow it.³ Tōrei worked into 1792, so an eighteenth-century date is compatible with the whole of his mature life and settles nothing about where in his career it sits. There is no inscription transcription in the online record to anchor it, and no published per-work scholarly treatment of this specific scroll was located. The reading above (the even contour, the turned figure, the manner held against Hakuin’s) is therefore a first-order reading of the object and is flagged as such, not a claim carried from a catalogue entry that does not exist for this work.

The attribution itself sits on the museum’s tombstone and the work’s standing accession (M.2006.207, Gift of Leslie Prince Salzman); it is reported here, not independently adjudicated. For a Hakuin-school disciple’s scroll this is the ordinary state of the evidence, and the honest move is to say so rather than manufacture certainty.

The other leg: Suiō, and why no Suiō Daruma is shown here

Suiō Genro is represented in the same collection by a cleared work, the Wild Duck Kōan (LACMA M.2006.198.3, c. 1760–1789, ink on paper), but its subject is the wild-duck koan, not Daruma, so it cannot stand as the hero of a Daruma article.⁵ It is named here for one reason: it shows that the second principal heir was also a working painter of the same kind of small ink scroll, on koan and Zen-figure subjects, in the same decades. The Hakuin-school painting practice was a two-legged thing, and both legs were doing it.

No Daruma by Suiō Genro was located on any of the public-domain image tracks consulted, and a known false trail should be named so it is not followed: a Cleveland Museum of Art work sometimes surfaced under the name “Suiō” is by Tamura Suiō, a different and earlier artist working in the ukiyo-e beauty-print idiom, and its subject is a courtesan, not Daruma. It is the wrong artist and the wrong subject and is not the Hakuin heir.⁶ The honest position is that the second-generation Hakuin-school Daruma corpus is, in publicly cleared imagery, thin: Tōrei’s wall-facer carries this article, and Suiō stands beside it by a non-Daruma work.

What transmitted, restated

Strip the scroll back to what it licenses. A subject passed: the wall-facing Daruma, taken over intact from the master. A way of holding the brush passed, recognisable but not identical, steadier in the heir’s hand than in Hakuin’s. And underneath both, the thing the lineage was institutionally built to carry — the reorganised koan curriculum and Tōrei’s account of it — passed, with the painting riding along inside it rather than being the point of it. That is what “the Hakuin school after Hakuin” means at the level of a single object: not a style preserved, but a practice continued by particular people whose hands were their own.

Related

• Hakuin Ekaku’s half-length Bodhidharma — a late-Edo Zen scroll
• Fūgai Ekun’s Daruma — the hermit’s reading

Sources

• Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Daruma Facing a Cave Wall while Meditating, Tōrei Enji, accession M.2006.207 (object record 133812), tombstone read 2026-05-19. Work PD-art (artist d. 1792); LACMA digital reproduction public domain (PD-LACMA); file via Wikimedia Commons.
• Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Wild Duck Kōan, Genrō Suiō, accession M.2006.198.3 (comparandum; PD-LACMA).
• Katsuhiro Yoshizawa (trans. Norman Waddell), The Religious Art of Zen Master Hakuin (Counterpoint, 2009; ISBN 9781582436357).
• Stephen Addiss and Audrey Yoshiko Seo, The Sound of One Hand: Paintings and Calligraphy by Zen Master Hakuin (Shambhala, 2010; ISBN 9781590305782).
• Helmut Brinker and Hiroshi Kanazawa (trans. Andreas Leisinger), Zen: Masters of Meditation in Images and Writings, Artibus Asiae Supplementum 40 (Artibus Asiae Publishers, Zurich, 1996; ISBN 9783907070628).
• Lineage and biographical scaffold cross-checked against Wikidata: Q20880050 (the scroll), Q17426718 (Tōrei Enji), Q17218297 (Suiō Genro), Q177059 (Hakuin Ekaku), read 2026-05-19.

Footnotes

Footnotes

1. Tōrei Enji (東嶺円慈, 1721–1792) received Hakuin’s robe and was his principal Dharma heir; Suiō Genro (遂翁元盧, 1717–1789) was the other senior heir, and later tradition paired the two as Hakuin’s “two divine legs.” Biographical scaffold cross-checked against Wikidata read 2026-05-19: Q17426718 (Tōrei Enji, “Japanese Rinzai Zen priest and calligrapher, 1721–1792”), Q17218297 (Suiō Genro, “Japanese Buddhist monk”; Wikidata gives 1717–1790, the LACMA tombstone 1717–1789 — the museum dating is followed here), Q177059 (Hakuin Ekaku, 1686–1769). ↩

2. Hakuin and Tōrei reorganised the koan curriculum that all modern Rinzai lineages descend through (continuing via Gasan Jitō, 1727–1797); Tōrei set out the practice in Shūmon mujintō ron (“The Undying Lamp of Zen”). These are uncontested lineage facts; no iconographic claim about the scroll rests on them. See Brinker and Kanazawa, Zen: Masters of Meditation in Images and Writings, Artibus Asiae Suppl. 40 (1996), for the general logic by which Zen painting is transmitted as a lineage practice rather than a copybook. ↩

3. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, accession M.2006.207 (online object record 133812), Daruma Facing a Cave Wall while Meditating, Tōrei Enji (Japan, 1721–1792), 18th century, hanging scroll, ink on paper; image 36.83 × 49.53 cm, mount 111.76 × 61.6 cm; Gift of Leslie Prince Salzman. Tombstone read live 2026-05-19. The integer 133812 is the database/URL handle; M.2006.207 is the catalogue accession used in prose. ↩ ↩² ↩³

4. For the documented Hakuin Daruma manner — the swelling-and-starving contour, the off-centre returning eyes in the frontal type — see Yoshizawa (trans. Waddell), The Religious Art of Zen Master Hakuin (2009), and Addiss and Seo, The Sound of One Hand (2010). The contrast drawn here between that manner and Tōrei’s steadier even contour is a first-order reading of the LACMA scroll against the published Hakuin idiom, not a claim taken from a per-work entry for this scroll, which was not located. ↩

5. Wikimedia Commons File:Wild Duck Koan LACMA M.2006.198.3.jpg: Genrō Suiō (Japan, 1717–1789), Wild Duck Kōan, c. 1760–1789, hanging scroll, ink on paper, LACMA accession M.2006.198.3, Gift of Leslie Prince Salzman, licence {{PD-LACMA}}, Wikidata Q20880060. Cited as comparandum only; the subject is the wild-duck koan, not Daruma. ↩

6. The Cleveland Museum of Art work returned under a “Suiō” name search is Beauty Receiving a Visitor (accession 1985.275) by Tamura Suiō (Japanese, active late 1600s–early 1700s) — a different, earlier artist in the ukiyo-e beauty-print idiom, subject a courtesan. It is neither Suiō Genro nor a Daruma and is not used. ↩