Lit. "three thousand Buddhas." One thousand Buddhas are believed to appear in the worlds of the past, present, and future eons respectively, and these are collectively known as the Three Thousand Buddhas, sanzenbutsu. Paintings of these Three Thousand Buddhas, called sanzenbutsu-zu 三千仏図, were used in an annual ceremony, held in the 12th month and called butsumyō-e 仏名会, at which their names were recited for the expiation of sins. First performed in Japan in 774 and institutionalized in the 9th century, this ceremony was discontinued in the late 14th century. Initially, the paintings used for this ceremony consisted of two hanging scrolls which between them depicted 13,000 Buddhas ichiman sanzenbutsu-zu 一万三千仏図, but from 918, the number was reduced to 3,000. These later 3,000-Buddha paintings usually consisted of three hanging scrolls, each depicting one thousand Buddhas surrounding a central Buddha representative of one of the eons, usually *Amida 阿弥陀 for the future, *Shaka 釈迦 for the present, or *Yakushi 薬師 for the past. Sometimes the three hanging scrolls were combined to form a single painting, and the oldest such painting extant is preserved at Kōryūji 広隆寺 in Kyoto and dates from the late Heian period.