From December 1894 to March 1895, Bostonians had opportunity to view Buddhist paintings of startling iconography and description never before shown in the West: forty-four Chinese images of Arhats, part of the one hundred scroll set of the Five Hundred Luohan completed by the painters Zhou Jichang and Lin Tinggui in ca. 1178-1188 and held from the sixteenth century by the Japanese Buddhist monastery Daitokuji. Sent abroad from Japan and exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in the late nineteenth century, the Daitokuji paintings sent ripples of sensation among the American city's Victorian cognoscenti, connoisseurs, and followers of Buddhism. The Luohan were also exhibited at the Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia (May 3-11) and were shown in New York City by the Century Association (May 25-30); thereafter they may have travelled as well to Europe. Not only did the Boston exhibition at the MFA create a spectacle of viewing, it led to spectacular acquisitions. Ten paintings, touted as masterpieces of Song Chinese Buddhist art, were singled-out by the exhibition's organizer Ernest Fenollosa, purchased for the sum of $10,000 by the museum benefactor Denman W. Ross, and came to reside permanently at the MFA never to return home to Kyoto. (In the first decade of the twentieth century, two additional paintings entered the collection of the American millionaire Charles L. Freer.) This paper examines the journey of the Daitokuji Luohan to Boston during the late nineteenth century and introduces materials that help us better understand their departure from the monastery at this time, their reception in Boston (in popular and art historical contexts), their diasporic fragmentation, and their later re-constitution (re-incarnation) at Daitokuji.