### Artwork Concept

There is a Buddhist expression, *Sōmoku Kokudo Shikkai Jōbutsu* (草木国土悉皆成仏).

The phrase developed as Buddhism traveled from China to Japan and encountered different traditions and beliefs. It has come to express the relationship between Buddha-nature and all forms of existence, including plants and the earth itself.

For me, these words evoke a world in which mountains and rivers, animals and plants, and we human beings are not isolated from one another, but exist within one vast circulation of life.

Perhaps I, too, simply happen to have been given the form of a human being for this brief moment in time.

What made me truly feel this was the death of a deer.

One summer day, while walking with my dog along my usual mountain path, I came across a deer lying dead on the road. It appeared to have slipped and fallen from the cliff above.

Living in the mountains, it is not unusual to encounter the remains of animals.

But the deer was still there the next day, and the day after that.

Black butterflies fluttered around its body, creating a strangely beautiful scene, almost as though they were mourning its death.

Eventually, other animals began to feed on the body. Its limbs became separated, and bodily fluids seeped into the ground. What remained of the flesh was gradually broken down by small organisms and microorganisms, until finally only the hide and bones remained.

When I first discovered the deer, I could think only of how sad it was, and I turned around and went home.

Watching its body gradually being eaten and losing its form was so visceral that, for a while, I would hurry past the place without looking.

But as I passed the deer day after day, I gradually began to observe its transformation.

And I remembered the words of the Buddha that I had read in the *Sutta Nipāta* and the *Dhammapada* about the body, aging, and death.

A living body and a dead body are not fundamentally separate things.

The body takes form temporarily through the coming together of many elements. In time, it ages, breaks apart, and transforms into something else.

The words I had previously known only as written teachings suddenly seemed to appear before me as reality—**with scent, color, and physical presence.**

And then something settled deeply within me:

**I, too, am only a tiny part of this vast circulation of life, taking the form of “me” for just a brief moment.**

The flesh and blood of the deer decompose and eventually return to the soil.

That soil nourishes plants. Other creatures feed on those plants, and their lives, in turn, become connected to other lives.

Water moves in the same way.

Rain falls upon the mountains, flows into rivers and onward to the sea, rises again as clouds, and eventually returns to the mountains. Along the way, it gives life without distinction—to humans, animals, plants, insects, and countless other living beings.

Suddenly, within the mountain landscape I had walked through so casually every day, I felt as though an entire world had revealed itself before me: countless lives intertwined, continually changing form and circulating through one another.

When that vision became inseparably connected in my mind with the words the Buddha had left behind, the core of this work was born.

In the painting, a young girl quietly receives a golden light descending from above into the palm of her hand.

The girl represents myself—**the person whose way of seeing the world was transformed through witnessing the death of the deer, and who received from that experience a new understanding.**