One Character Lotus Sutra (Opening and Closing Together

A Lotus Sutra Where Every Character Sits on Its Own Flower

Unroll one of the nine scrolls kept at Ryūkō-ji and the Lotus Sutra appears not as continuous lines of text but as thousands of single characters, each one resting on a small painted lotus. The complete threefold Lotus Sutra runs to roughly 69,384 characters, and a Heian-period hand set every one of them on its own flower, as if each brushed word were a Buddha seated on a lotus throne. This is the Ichiji Rendai Hokekyō, the "Lotus Sutra of single-character lotus pedestals," an ornamented sutra (sōshokukyō) copied in the late Heian period and held today by a Tendai temple in Aizumisato, deep in the mountains of western Fukushima.

The full title recorded in the national register is Ichiji Rendai Hokekyō: kaiketsu-tomo (kan dai-roku ketsu). The phrase kaiketsu-tomo means that the set includes not only the eight scrolls of the Lotus Sutra itself but also its prologue scripture, the Sutra of Innumerable Meanings, and its epilogue, the Sutra of Meditation on the Bodhisattva Universal Virtue. Together these form the threefold Lotus Sutra. The parenthetical note records that the sixth scroll is missing: of an original set of ten, nine survive.

Why It Became a National Treasure

The scrolls were designated a National Treasure on 29 March 1952. Fukushima Prefecture holds only three National Treasures in all, and this is one of them, which gives some sense of how unusual a survival it is.

To copy a sutra in Heian Japan was an act of devotion that earned spiritual merit, and the wealthy poured enormous effort into making their copies beautiful. The single-character lotus form pushes that idea about as far as it can go. Each character is treated as a Buddha in its own right, so the act of copying becomes the act of enthroning tens of thousands of Buddhas on lotus blossoms, one by one. The closest comparison is the celebrated Heike Nōkyō dedicated by the Taira clan at Itsukushima; both belong to the high tide of ornamented sutra production among the late-Heian aristocracy.

What makes the Ryūkō-ji set remarkable is not only the conception but the consistency. The lotuses are painted across nine long scrolls without the labor flagging, and the materials are of the highest grade available at the time. The result is a work that scholars place among the finest surviving single-character sutras anywhere in Japan.

What to Look For

The writing surface is ganpi paper, a fine, durable sheet prized for its resistance to insects and damp. Down each scroll run ruling lines drawn in silver, with seventeen characters fitted to a line. The silver has tarnished over the centuries into a soft iron-gray, which many viewers find more affecting than bright metal would be.

Look closely at the lotuses and a pattern emerges. Each pedestal is a five-petalled lotus shown in two tiers, as though caught at the moment of opening. The petals are colored in malachite green, azurite blue, red lead, gold, and silver, and the colors are not scattered at random. Set against one another across the page, the differently colored pedestals fall into a faint lozenge pattern, a piece of design discipline that only reveals itself once you stop reading the text and start watching the color.

The characters themselves are written in an elegant Japanese-style regular script, brushed in black ink with great care. More than one hand can be detected across the surviving scrolls, a reminder that a project on this scale was shared among several copyists. A local tradition holds that the writing took some 280 years to complete; the figure is best read as an expression of the labor involved rather than a documented timeline.

The Temple and the Country Around It

Ryūkō-ji is a Tendai temple whose formal mountain name is Dōjusan. By tradition it was founded in 848 by the monk Ennin, posthumously known as Jikaku Daishi, who is said to have named it after the Longxing-si in Yangzhou, China, a temple he had visited and whose setting reportedly reminded him of the Takada district of Aizu. Its principal image is Amida Nyorai. The temple is also remembered as the place where Tenkai, the influential Tendai prelate who advised the first three Tokugawa shoguns, is said to have taken the tonsure, and the graves believed to be those of his parents stand on the grounds. No documents confirm the link, so the connection remains a local tradition rather than established fact.

Many visitors come for the lotuses rather than the sutra. The temple keeps a pond called Kahōen planted with several rare varieties, including the Ōga lotus and a strain grown from seeds said to be some eight centuries old, brought from Chūson-ji in Hiraizumi. The flowers open in July. Ryūkō-ji also enshrines a red Fudō Myōō, one of the five colored Fudō images of the Aizu region.

The National Treasure is not on permanent display. Because the scrolls are fragile, viewing requires an advance reservation, admission is by donation, and a visit may be called off in poor weather to protect the work. Travelers who cannot arrange a viewing can still see related sections of the same original sutra when national museums in Nara, Kyoto, and Tokyo show them on rotation. A short distance away stands Isasumi Shrine, one of the oldest and most revered shrines in Aizu, which pairs naturally with a temple visit.

Ryūkō-ji sits about ten minutes on foot from Aizu-Takada Station on the JR Tadami Line; by car it is a short drive from the Aizu-Wakamatsu interchange. The wider Aizu basin, with Tsuruga Castle at Aizu-Wakamatsu and the lake country around Inawashiro, makes an easy base for the trip.