By the time Hakuin Ekaku was a young monk, Rinzai Zen in Japan had been drifting for generations, its koan practice grown routine and its teaching lines thin. Hakuin is the figure Zen history credits with reversing that slide almost single handedly, through decades of rigorous personal practice, a reorganized and more demanding approach to koan study that Rinzai temples still use today, and, in his later years, an outpouring of ink paintings and calligraphy that took Zen teaching somewhere it had rarely gone before: directly to ordinary people who would never sit a formal retreat.
This scroll belongs to that second, less expected phase of his career. Hakuin painted Kannon, the bodhisattva of compassion, again and again in his final decades, a devotion he traced in part to his own mother's piety. Here she leans at ease on a cliff ledge above a lotus pond, a ruyi scepter and sutra scroll set before her, a vase of willow and plum signaling the turn toward spring behind her. The painting carries no signature, only Hakuin's personal seals, one of them reading simply "Look, reflect on it, ah!" It is a small, almost private instruction, embedded in a public image, from a monk who spent his last decades trying to put Zen where anyone might stumble across it.