A long verse rains down upon the dried husk of a skull on this unusual large work by the famous swordsman and calligrapher Yamaoka Tesshu. Ink on paper in the original border. The scroll is 62 x 178 cm. There is some toning and foxing consistent with age. It would be a seminal work cleaned and remounted.
Yamaoka Tesshu (1836-1888) was a famous samurai of the late Edo, who played an important role in the Meiji Restoration. He was born into a samurai family in Edo, retainers of the Shogun, in 1836 with the given name Ono Tetsutaro. Tesshu began his study of swordsmanship when he was nine years old. When he was seventeen, he joined the government's Kobukan Military Institute and the Yamaoka School of Spear Fighting under Yamaoka Seizan. Not long after Yamaoka had joined the dojo, Seizan died, Tesshu went on to marry Seizan's sister in order to carry on the Yamaoka name. Three years later, in 1856, he became supervising instructor of swordsmanship at the Kobukan. In 1863, he became supervisor of the Roshigumi (a force of rōnin or "masterless samurai" serving as a mercenary auxiliary force to the Shogunal army). When he was twenty-eight, Tesshu was defeated by a swordsman named Asari Gimei and became his student. Although larger and younger, Tesshu could not match his teacher's mental state. In 1868, he was appointed chief of an elite bodyguard for the 15th Shōgun Tokugawa Yoshinobu. He went to Sunpu to negotiate with Saigō Takamori, and brought about Saigō's meeting with Katsu Kaishū, thereby contributing to the surrender of Edo Castle to imperial forces. Then Tesshu became a tutor for the Emperor Meiji during the emperor's early adulthood. In 1880, when he was 45 years old, Tesshu attained enlightenment while sitting in zazen. Later that morning he went to the dojo to practice Kendo with Asari. Upon seeing Tesshu, Asari recognized at once that Tesshu had reached enlightenment. Asari, declined to fence with Tesshu, acknowledging Tesshu's attainment by saying, “You have arrived.” Shortly after this, Tesshu went on to open his own school of fencing. Tesshu died from stomach cancer, in 1888, at the age of fifty-three. On the day before he died, Tesshu noticed that there were no sounds of training to be heard from his dojo. When Tesshu was told that the students had canceled training to be with him in his last hours, he ordered them to return to the dojo saying, “Training is the only way to honor me!”
He then composed his death poem:
Tightening my abdomen
against the pain.
The cry of a morning crow.
Legend says he sat in a meditative position and closed his eyes until drawing his final breath.
