Kobo Daishi’s Will (silk)

A Silk Testament Kept at Tō-ji

Among the documents held at Tō-ji in the south of Kyoto is a single handscroll written on silk, known as the Kōbō Daishi Yuigō, the "testament of Kōbō Daishi." Kōbō Daishi is the posthumous title of Kūkai (774–835), the monk who founded the Shingon school of esoteric Buddhism in Japan. The scroll belongs to a body of writing called the Goyuigō, the final instructions said to have been left by Kūkai for his disciples.

What sets this copy apart is its material. Most Goyuigō manuscripts are written on paper; this one is brushed onto silk. The national cultural-property database records it as a komonjo, an old document, in a single scroll, and dates it to the Heian period (794–1185).

What the Goyuigō Says

The text carries the date of the fifteenth day of the third month of 835, six days before Kūkai died on the twenty-first. In its best-known form it runs to twenty-five articles. It foretells his passing and then turns practical, setting out in detail how the Shingon temples should be run and how the teaching should be guarded once he was gone. One article forbids drinking alcohol within the monks' quarters. In another passage Kūkai describes where he expects to be after death: dwelling in the Tuṣita heaven beside the future Buddha Maitreya, watching through a gap in the clouds for signs of faith among the living. For the Shingon school these directions became something close to a founding charter, copied and guarded with unusual care.

There is a point worth knowing before you go looking for it. Although the Goyuigō speaks in Kūkai's voice and bears his date, most scholars do not accept it as his own composition. The text surfaces only after the year 895, and its language and content point to a compilation made around the middle of the tenth century, roughly a hundred years after his death. The oldest surviving manuscript bears a date corresponding to 969. It is read today, then, not as a letter from Kūkai's hand but as a document of the early Shingon community looking back to its founder. That reading takes nothing away from its weight. For more than a thousand years the school measured itself against these words.

Why It Is Designated

The designation date attached to this scroll places it at the very start of cultural-property protection in Japan. In June 1897 the government enacted the Ancient Shrines and Temples Preservation Law, the first modern statute to protect religious art and architecture, to ban its sale or export, and to fund its repair. The first objects were designated that December, on the twenty-eighth, and the Tō-ji silk Yuigō was among them.

At that time such items were labelled kokuhō, "national treasures," under the old law's broad use of the word. When the present Cultural Properties Protection Law took effect in 1950, the system was reorganized. The term kokuhō was redefined to mean only the most exceptional pieces, and the great majority of earlier designations, this scroll included, were carried over into a broader category, the Important Cultural Property (jūyō bunkazai). The 1897 date recorded in the national database is the original designation under the older law. Reading it, you are looking at one of the oldest officially protected objects in the country.

Seeing the Scroll, and the Temple Around It

This is not a work that announces itself. Columns of brushed characters run across the silk, faint in places with age, and its interest lies in what it is and what it records rather than in color or ornament. It rewards a visitor who arrives already knowing something of the text behind it.

The scroll is not on permanent view. Like the great bulk of Tō-ji's holdings, more than twenty-five thousand designated items, it is kept in the temple's Treasure Hall (Hōmotsukan) and brought out only on occasion. The Treasure Hall opens to the public twice a year, in spring and autumn, each time around a chosen theme, with the objects on display rotating between and within those seasons. Its appearance in any given exhibition depends entirely on that season's program, so anyone hoping to see the original should check the current listing before setting out. What is always there is the place that produced it: the temple Kūkai himself shaped.

Around Tō-ji

Tō-ji, formally Kyōōgokoku-ji, stands a short walk southwest of Kyoto Station and is among the easiest of the city's great monuments to reach. It was founded in 796, two years after the capital moved to Heian-kyō, as one of two official temples set to guard the city's main gate. In 823 the emperor granted it to Kūkai, who made it the principal training center of Shingon esoteric Buddhism.

The precinct repays a visit on its own account. Its five-story pagoda, rebuilt in 1644 under the shogun Tokugawa Iemitsu, rises about fifty-five meters and is the tallest wooden pagoda in Japan, a fixed point of the Kyoto skyline. The Kondō, or main hall, and the lecture hall sit at the heart of the complex; the lecture hall holds twenty-one statues arranged as a three-dimensional mandala that Kūkai conceived. The temple is inscribed as part of the Historic Monuments of Ancient Kyoto on the World Heritage list.

On the twenty-first of each month, the day of Kūkai's death, the grounds fill with the Kōbō-ichi, a large open-air market of antiques, food, and crafts that has run for centuries. Getting to the temple is straightforward: about a fifteen-minute walk from Kyoto Station, or one stop on the Kintetsu line to Tōji Station and then a walk of five to ten minutes. City buses stop close to the eastern and southern gates.