Testament of the Dying Brush: Reading the Final Calligraphies of a Seventeenth-century Zen Buddhist Master

“Deathbed verses” in the Chan or Zen Buddhist tradition are deliberate acts of composing poetry, performed by a master in preparation for their imminent passing. They reflect a ceremonial and intentional engagement with mortality. Deathbed verses have been traditionally understood as sacred expressions of enlightenment or transcendent spontaneity. This paper shifts attention to their calligraphic medium, and explores how visual, sensory, and temporal dimensions materialize as embodied traces within dying’s liminality. I focus on three final calligraphies by a seventeenth-century Chinese Ōbaku Zen master in Japan—brushed in his last three days. I analyze divergences in poetic rhetoric and stylistic features, and examine them alongside the master’s earlier calligraphies and disciples’ account of his final moments. Combining art historical analysis with sensory religion approaches, this paper demonstrates how intentional dying is both performed and memorialized through brush traces of the dying master.