Zenga, the ink paintings and calligraphy Zen monks produced outside formal commission, rarely followed the conventions of workshop art. Hakuin Ekaku left no signature on this Kannon, and none was needed. Across a body of work numbering in the thousands, his seals alone were enough to make a painting recognizably his, the same way his handwriting or a particular turn of brushwork might identify a letter without a name attached. This scroll carries the seal reading "Look, reflect on it, ah!", a phrase as much instruction as signature, aimed at whoever eventually stood in front of the finished painting rather than at whoever might later try to catalogue it.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art dates the work to the 1750s, placing it among the paintings of Hakuin's final and most prolific decade, when he was in his sixties and seventies and producing devotional images at a pace that has left museums around the world holding examples of his Kannon paintings specifically. That repetition was not artistic exhaustion. Hakuin returned to Kannon because the bodhisattva of compassion was, for him, an image worth making again and again, each version a fresh occasion for the kind of direct, unmediated attention he wanted Zen practice itself to produce. The Museum acquired this particular version in 2025, nearly two hundred seventy years after it was painted, as the Jane and Raphael Bernstein Gift.