Page:Japanese Wood Engravings.djvu/19

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
JAPANESE WOOD ENGRAVINGS
11

Chinese characters than in the delineation of the human frame, as the reduced copy in Fig. 3 will show. Mr. Satow (loc. cit.) refers to other blocks which go back even as far as the beginning of the twelfth century;

Fig. 3.—Reduced facsimilie of a wood engraving, attributed to the Buddhist priest Nichiren (1222–1282). (Author's Collection.)

but perhaps the most satisfactory are the series, one of which is reproduced in Fig. 4, signed by a priest named Riokin, and dated 1325, six years before the publication of the Chinese Kwanyin Sutra, and nearly a century