Qixian Sanskrit Ink Painting〈Meisho Qiche Kaido Various

A National Treasure in the Hand of a Chinese Monk Who Never Went Home

Two hanging scrolls, brushed on silk in large, confident Chinese characters, have come down from the fourteenth century in the collection of a Kyoto temple that almost no one is allowed to enter. They carry the hand of Jikusen Bonsen (Zhuxian Fanxian), a Chan monk who left Yuan-dynasty China in 1329 and spent the rest of his life in Japan. The pair, recorded as the Myōsō Saitetsu Kaidō Shozan-so, was designated a National Treasure in 1952. Among the several works of Jikusen's brush that survive, this is the only one to reach that rank.

The temple is Ryōkō-in, a sub-temple of the great Rinzai monastery Daitoku-ji in northern Kyoto. It keeps four National Treasures behind doors that stay shut to the public, including the celebrated yōhen tenmoku tea bowl. The calligraphy here is one of those four, and to understand why a pair of ceremonial documents earned the country's highest cultural designation, it helps to know what kind of writing this is.

What the Scrolls Actually Record

In the Zen tradition, the brushwork of an eminent master is called bokuseki. It is prized less as decorative penmanship than as a direct trace of the writer's mind and of an unbroken teaching lineage. A line of bokuseki by a respected abbot was treated as a kind of certificate of spiritual descent, and later it became the most coveted form of hanging scroll in the tea room.

The event behind these two scrolls is a kaidō, the formal ceremony at which a Zen monk first ascends the abbot's high seat and preaches to the assembled community. A kaidō was a public, lineage-defining moment, and it generated formal documents. The word shozan points to the official ranking of Zen monasteries under the medieval Gozan system: the Five Mountains at the top, then the Ten Temples, and below them the broad tier called shozan, the "various mountains." A so is a formal ceremonial address written in elevated parallel prose.

So the title describes a pair of formal documents, in Jikusen's own hand, connected with the abbatial installation of a monk named Myōsō Saitetsu. The Agency for Cultural Affairs records the work as a product of the Yuan and Nanbokuchō periods, written in China and Japan, classed under calligraphy and manuscripts. The two scrolls are mounted on silk rather than paper, which is itself unusual for documents of this type and gives the surface a particular weight.

Why This Brush Mattered

Jikusen came from Qingyuan in coastal Zhejiang and inherited the Dharma of the Chinese master Gulin Qingmao. He crossed to Japan in 1329 at the invitation of a Kyushu warlord, traveling in the company of another émigré monk, Minki Soshun. Within a year he was in Kamakura, where the Ashikaga brothers Takauji and Tadayoshi took him as their teacher. He went on to lead a string of major monasteries, among them Nanzen-ji in Kyoto and Kenchō-ji in Kamakura, and contemporaries ranked his learning second only to that of the earlier émigré Issan Ichinei.

His real legacy was cultural. Across roughly two decades in Japan he trained a generation of monks and helped lay the groundwork for Gozan literature, the body of Chinese-style poetry and prose produced by Kyoto and Kamakura Zen monks from the late Kamakura era into the Muromachi period. The calligraphy in these scrolls belongs to that moment of transmission, when Chinese Chan culture was being absorbed and remade on Japanese soil.

The scrolls stand out within Jikusen's surviving output for their scale. The characters are large and the format generous, and the writing shows the free, vigorous movement that scholars treat as characteristic of his hand. That combination, a major figure writing at full stretch on a ceremonial occasion, is why this particular pair was raised above his other designated works to National Treasure status in 1952.

Seeing It, and Seeing Around It

Here is the difficult part for any visitor. Ryōkō-in does not open. It holds no special viewings and admits no general public, which has earned it a reputation as the home of the hardest National Treasures in Japan to lay eyes on. Its Mittan tea room is one of only three tea rooms designated National Treasures, and the only one of the three that ordinary visitors cannot see.

The exceptions are rare. In 2019 the MIHO MUSEUM in Shiga mounted an exhibition that brought the temple's treasures out together for the first time, the Jikusen scrolls among them alongside the yōhen tenmoku bowl. Watching for a loan exhibition of this kind, at MIHO or a major museum, is realistically the only way the public encounters the work.

What you can do is walk the place it lives. The Daitoku-ji complex spreads across a quiet quarter of Murasakino, its lanes lined with earthen walls and gravel. Several of its other sub-temples keep regular hours, including Daisen-in with its famous dry landscape garden, Kōtō-in among its maples, Ryōgen-in, and Zuihō-in. Ryōkō-in's closed gate sits among them, and standing outside it, knowing what the building guards, is its own kind of visit.