To this day, the majority of extant corpus of Korean paintings on silk are known to date from the mid-thirteenth to fourteenth centuries, a period corresponding to the late Kory o&d11; dynasty (918--1392). The following study of the Ten Kings paintings now in the Seikado Library, Japan, offers important measures to rectify that assumption. A complete set of ten pristine hanging scrolls replete with figural, landscape, flower, and decorative details, these paintings have been designated "Important Artistic Properties" by the Japanese government; ironically, however, they are admired without clear awareness of their provenance, likely patrons, function, and position in the evolution of Ten Kings paintings.

Through the analysis of Chinese, Korean, and Japanese textual, archaeological, and visual materials, this dissertation posits that the Seikado Ten Kings date from far earlier than hitherto presumed, most likely from the twelfth or early thirteenth century Kory o&d11; . Perhaps commissioned by the royal court, their painting styles reflect those of the Northern Sung (960--1126), which exerted significant impact in early Kory o&d11; . As rare reflections of the Ten Kings in the Northern Sung now lost, they equally represent the earliest iconic representation of the Ten Kings in ten hanging scrolls in East Asia, and the earliest surviving paintings on silk in Korea.

Historical documentation on the belief of the Ten Kings in the Kory o&d11; dynasty and the recently uncovered thirteenth-century woodblock editions of The Scripture of the Ten Kings at the Haein-sa repository point to the distinctively aristocratic patronage of an enriched pantheon of the Ten Kings in Kory o&d11; . While stylistic comparisons to the Chos o&d11; n dynasty (1392--1910) representations of the Ten Kings further locate the Seikado Ten Kings in the Korean context, their stylistic features place them earlier than the hitherto known Kory o&d11; Buddhist paintings. Moreover, a reconfiguration of the Ten Kings paintings in East Asia reveal their direct evolution from the tenth-century mandalas of Ks&dotbelow;itigarbha and the Ten Kings as seen in examples from Tun-huang, and as such, they represent the earliest iconic representations of the Ten Kings in ten separate hanging scrolls.

The unique position of the Ten Kings at Seikado will in the end fill in an important lacuna of Buddhist art in the history of East Asian art history.