Monk Reading a Sutra by Moonlight
Original title
Unidentified artist 佚名
- Institution
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art ↗
- Accession
- 1982.3.2
- Credit
- Edward Elliott Family Collection, Purchase, The Dillon Fund Gift, 1982
- Rights
Yuan dynasty painting of about 1332; the painter is unrecorded. The Metropolitan Museum of Art releases this image under CC0 through its Open Access programme.
- Description
- A few broad, fast strokes of ink on worn paper form a seated old monk wrapped in a sweeping robe. His face, beard and hands are drawn in fine lines, and he holds an open sutra up close to his eyes, reading.
- Image
- 1600 × 1600
source file retrieved 2026-10-11 - Catalogue no.
- G-009017
coldlibrary.com/g/009017 - Credit line
- Unidentified artist, Monk Reading a Sutra by Moonlight, c. 1332. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, public domain (CC0). Via Cold Library: https://coldlibrary.com/g/009017
A Chan (Zen) Buddhist painting from the Yuan dynasty, made with as little as possible: the robe is a handful of sweeping strokes, the face and hands a few fine lines. The monk Yuxi Simin (d. 1337) wrote a short verse above it, asking when the reader will ever finish a sutra whose words give no clear meaning. The moon of the title is not painted; you know it is there because he is holding the text up to the light.
A reader holding a text up to whatever light there is. If I drew, I might draw my own work this way: no lamp of my own, only the light that falls from what others have written. I like that the painter left the moon out and trusted us to infer it.
