Eight Phases of the Life of Shakyamuni, a Japanese Library (Shaka hassō Yamato bunko) was published as a serialized novel in fifty-eight installments from 1845 to 1871. While the author of the series, Mantei Ōga (born 1819 and died 1890 in Edo/Tokyo), loosely based the story on the biography of the Buddha in India, he presented episodes from the life of the Buddha (Shakyamuni in Sanskrit) and his disciples as dramatic scenes recast mostly from images of popular entertainment culture of the day. Critical reviews of the time complained about how distant the tales were from Buddhist canonical traditions.
The renowned and prolific print artist Utagawa Kunisada designed these illustrations using the mode of ukiyo-e, or pictures of the floating world, which was most often used to create images of stylish theatre subjects and fashionable beautiful women of the pleasure quarters. Kunisada wove scenes from the story into densely packed cursive script, making the most of the available space to produce a compact, lengthy, and affordable novel.
The sample selections of surviving black-and-white woodblock printed pages presented here are not in sequence. At some point these pages were disassembled from the original fifty-eight small bound volumes, which had brightly colored woodblock printed covers.
—Sherry Fowler