The Lotus Sutra in Gold Letters on Navy Blue Paper

A Lotus Sutra Written by Two Brothers in Gold

In the years around 1170, the warlord Taira no Kiyomori and his younger half-brother Yorimori set out to copy the Lotus Sutra together. The result, kept today at Itsukushima Shrine on the island of Miyajima, is one of the more unusual sacred texts to survive from medieval Japan: seven scrolls of scripture brushed in gold ink across paper dyed a deep indigo blue. It carries the plain catalog name Konshi Kinji Hokekyō, which simply means a Lotus Sutra written in gold characters on dark-blue paper.

What sets it apart is the handwriting. The two brothers shared the work scroll by scroll. Kiyomori brushed the opening lines of each volume, and Yorimori carried the text through to the end. A sutra copied by two hands in this way is called a ryōhitsukyō in Japanese, and few examples survive with so clear a link to the men who held the brushes.

The shrine also owns a far more famous body of scripture, the lavishly decorated Heike Nōkyō of 1164, and the two are easy to confuse. This gold-on-indigo Lotus Sutra is the quieter relative. It was copied a few years later, wears far less ornament, and is prized above all for its calligraphy and its documented history.

Why It Is a National Treasure

Japan's Agency for Cultural Affairs designated the seven scrolls a National Treasure on 20 March 1954, classed under calligraphy and classical texts. According to the Hiroshima Prefectural Board of Education, Yorimori copied and dedicated the set together with his elder brother between the ninth month of 1170 and the fourth month of 1172, as an act of religious merit that bound the two men in shared devotion.

The set was once larger. It originally ran to ten scrolls: the eight-volume Lotus Sutra, its traditional opening scripture the Sutra of Innumerable Meanings, and its closing scripture the Sutra of Meditation on the Bodhisattva Samantabhadra. The opening sutra and the fourth volume of the Lotus Sutra left the shrine long ago. Loose fragments of the lost material later circulated among collectors under the name Itsukushima-gire, literally "Itsukushima cuttings." Seven volumes of the Lotus Sutra remain at the shrine, while the surviving closing sutra is registered as a separate National Treasure. A gilt-bronze sutra box that holds the scrolls is included in the designation as an ancillary item.

Historians value the scrolls for two reasons. They are firmly dated and firmly attributed, which is rare for twelfth-century calligraphy, and they preserve the actual brushwork of Kiyomori, the most powerful figure at the late Heian court, at the height of his influence.

What to Look For

Each scroll opens with a frontispiece painted in gold pigment, called the mikaeshi, showing scenes such as the Buddha preaching to an assembly. These small paintings introduce the scripture the way an illustrated title page introduces a book. The covers carry a repeating floral medallion pattern known as hōsōge, an idealized blossom common in Buddhist decoration, set against the dark blue ground.

Look closely where the two hands meet. The shift from Kiyomori's opening lines to Yorimori's continuation can be read by a practiced eye in the rhythm and pressure of the strokes, a quiet record of two brothers writing in turn.

Gold ink on indigo was a deliberate choice. The pairing was reserved for scriptures of high standing, the blue suggesting lapis and the gold suggesting the radiance of the Buddhist teaching. The materials themselves were a form of reverence.

One practical note. The originals are fragile and sensitive to light, so they are not on permanent view. The shrine displays replicas in its Treasure Hall and brings out a selection of the actual scrolls during the autumn Treasure Masterpiece Exhibition. This particular sutra appears fairly often in that rotation.

Visiting Miyajima and the Shrine

Itsukushima Shrine stands over a tidal flat on Miyajima, a wooded island in the Seto Inland Sea reached by a short ferry from Miyajimaguchi, about a thirty-minute train ride southwest of central Hiroshima. The crossing takes roughly ten minutes, and the shrine is a fifteen-minute walk from the pier along a street lined with shops and free-roaming deer.

The Treasure Hall sits just outside the shrine exit, across from Daiganji temple. Opened in 1934, it was an early fireproof building of reinforced concrete finished in lacquer, and it shows a rotating selection from the roughly 260 designated objects the shrine owns, including a replica of the Heike Nōkyō. Admission is modest. Many visitors take in the shrine, the offshore torii gate, and the hall over a single half-day, with the climb up Mount Misen as an option for those who linger longer.