Everyone, sometime in life, has a chance encounter: a meeting that mysteriously changes one's destiny.
My meeting with Kagaku Murakami was one of these. In 1963, I was studying to become an art dealer when a question began to nag me incessantly: What is an art dealer? Tired of trying to answer it, I was almost on the point of giving up entirely the idea of becoming an art dealer.
Then one day I went to see a Kagaku Murakami exhibition composed of over one hundred of his works held in The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto. One of his paintings, Prince Siddhartha Meditating under a Tree, caught my eye. Standing in front of it I felt something I had never felt before, like a bombardment of emotions so strong it made me tremble.
It wasn't the mastery of the painting, the beauty of the colors, or anything like it, but the shock of realizing that this man existed.
I found it hard to pull myself away from the painting. I came back again and again to gaze at it. Later, just before it was time for the museum to close, from far away I saw an old man clapping his hands in front of this painting.Whether it was from the emotion inspired by the painting or whether he was praying to it as a Buddhist icon, I don't know. But the scene left such a vivid impression on me that I will never forget it.
This single painting led me to devote my life to art. I have no other way of describing the event than to say it was a fateful encounter.
And at that time I had a presentiment that the picture would one day be mine. I felt that if I were near it, I could die in peace. Even now I don't know why I thought that. But in another way, it suggested to me how I should die.
After that, my desire to know more about the artist and his works grew. As if possessed, I hungered for and acquired the few works he had left behind of his death, until I had collected more than 220 pieces. I must have appeared to be slightly out of my mind.
For eighteen years, the presentiment, or should I call it the ungrounded conviction, never left me that some day I would own Prince Siddhartha Meditating under a Tree.
I prided myself that my devotion for this painting was second to none. Languishing, burning to possess it, I bided my time with unbearable impatience, until finally, after eighteen years, my prayers were answered and I made the trip to Mt. Rokko in Kobe to bring it back personally, lovingly, to Kyoto.
It was a cold winter day, February 26, 1980.
Today, when I sit opposite from where it hangs in an alcove of the Kahitsukan and look at it, vast, indescribable emotions well up in me. Some of these feelings inevitably are memories of my youth, since my encounter with Prince Siddhartha Meditating under a Tree took place when I was twentyone years old, in my third year as an art dealer, while I was still studying and learning about the profession.
Sometimes also I'm filled with admiration for the young Siddhartha, sitting in meditation under the sacred fig tree on the banks of the Nairanjana.
What I next remember is thinking about death as a youth.
The death I thought about was neither world-weary nor nihilistic; on the contrary, these thoughts were a way to realize clearly what living meant to me.
And it was Kagaku's painting that solved this vital problem for me. Prince Siddhartha Meditating under a Tree was the starting point for all my meditations, methods of thought, and life work. But the man who created this work of art that means so much to me, Kagaku Murakami, is unknown to me.
However, now as I sit and look at this painting, I get a feeling of Kagaku's severity and his richness, which cleanses and warms my heart.
(Director, Kahitsukan - Kyoto Museum of Contemporary Art)
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