Attached Law Letter Written by Shun/March 2nd, 3rd Year of

A Letter Written a Month Before Death

In the third month of Karoku 3 (1227), the monk Shunjō took up his brush and wrote a short certificate confirming that his disciple Shinkai had received the full transmission of his teaching. He died roughly a month later. That single mounted scroll, called the Fuhōjō (附法状, "Certificate of Dharma Transmission"), survives at Sennyū-ji in the Higashiyama hills of Kyoto, and it carries the highest level of protection Japan grants a cultural object: it is a National Treasure.

A fuhō (also written 付法) is the act by which a Buddhist master passes his teaching and lineage to a chosen successor. The written certificate that records the act functions partly as a credential and partly as a personal testament. This one is short. Its weight comes from what it represents and from who held the brush.

Shunjō (1166–1227) came from Higo Province, present-day Kumamoto. He was tonsured at eighteen, received the full monastic precepts at Kanzeon-ji near Dazaifu, and in 1199 sailed to Song China to study. Over about twelve years he trained in Zen, the Vinaya code of monastic discipline, and Tendai doctrine before returning home in 1211. A patron named Utsunomiya Nobufusa gave him a decayed temple called Sen'yū-ji; Shunjō rebuilt it, renamed it Sennyū-ji after a spring that welled up on the grounds, and ran it as a rare center where four traditions were studied together: Vinaya, esoteric Shingon, Zen, and Pure Land.

Why It Became a National Treasure

The Fuhōjō was designated a National Treasure on 22 November 1952, in the category of ancient documents (komonjo). Two qualities lie behind that ranking.

The first is the hand that wrote it. Shunjō was admired as a calligrapher, and his reputation reached as far as Song China itself, where his brushwork was praised. He is credited with bringing the new Song manner of writing into Japan. His companion National Treasure at the same temple, the Sennyū-ji Kan'enso, a fundraising appeal he composed in 1219 to rebuild the temple, is written in a flowing running script in the style of the Song master Huang Tingjian, and it shows that influence plainly. The two scrolls are studied together as the core surviving examples of his calligraphy.

The second is what the document records. The Fuhōjō fixes the moment when Shunjō's line of teaching passed to the next generation, and it does so in his own hand near the end of his life. For the school that grew at Sennyū-ji, it is a founding record rather than an ordinary letter. The dating reflects that closeness to his death: the certificate is dated the twenty-second day of the third month of Karoku 3, and Shunjō died on the eighth day of the intercalary third month of the same year, 1227. (Visitors who check the national heritage database will see its year field list 1277; this conflicts with the era name written on the scroll and with Shunjō's own dates, and appears to be a clerical error for 1227.)

What You Can Actually See

An honest note first. The Fuhōjō is a fragile thirteenth-century document, and like most paper National Treasures it is not on permanent view. It was carefully restored in 2018 and 2019. It surfaces only on special occasions, for example loan exhibitions at the Kyoto National Museum or themed rotations at the temple's own treasure hall. Planning a trip specifically to stand in front of the original is not realistic; catching it depends on the exhibition calendar.

What a visit to Sennyū-ji does offer is the world the document came from. The treasure hall, the Shinshōden, opened in 2004 and shows the temple's scrolls, paintings, sutras, and documents in rotating thematic displays, changed several times a year and included in the general admission. On any given visit you might find imperial portraits, Buddhist paintings, or one of the temple's other treasures on the wall.

Shunjō himself is still present on the grounds. His grave, an egg-shaped muhōtō stone marker, stands inside the Founder's Hall, an Important Cultural Property. Walk up to it and you are a few steps from the man who wrote the scroll. The Buddha Hall holds a Shaka triad beneath a ceiling dragon attributed to Kanō Tan'yū, and the Yōkihi Kannon Hall keeps a Southern Song seated Kannon, long nicknamed for the Tang beauty Yang Guifei and visited today by people praying for love and a good match.

Around the Temple

Sennyū-ji sits in a quiet valley below Mount Tsukinowa, a short distance from the far busier Tōfukuji, and the two pair naturally into one half-day on foot. The temple is known as the Mitera, the imperial temple, because the Tsukinowa Mausoleum within its precincts holds the tombs of many emperors, beginning in the Kamakura period. The long sloping approach down to the Buddha Hall is one of the more unusual temple entrances in Kyoto, descending rather than climbing.

From Kyoto Station, take city bus 208 to the Sennyūji-michi stop, then walk about fifteen minutes uphill into the grounds. From Tōfukuji Station on the JR and Keihan lines it is roughly a twenty-minute walk. The lanes include gentle slopes, so comfortable shoes help. If your timing is flexible, the great Nirvana painting, sixteen metres by eight, is shown for a few days each March, and the New Year Seven Lucky Gods circuit through the subtemples is a local fixture in January.