A rebus ☆f the sutras…

Nankei Tachibana
Tozai Yuki, 1911

‘In the seventeenth century, Japanese printers began creating a type of book for the illiterate, allowing them to recite sutras and other devotional prayers, without knowledge of any written language. The texts work by a rebus principle (known as hanjimono), where each drawn image, when named aloud, sounds out a Chinese syllable’

at the @PublicDomainRev

Reciting Pictures: Buddhist Texts for the Illiterate ↓
https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/buddhist-texts-for-the-illiterate/