Takano Miscellany

A Bundle of Letters, Copied by Hand

In the sixth month of 1171, a monk named Hanga sat at Rishuin, a cloister of Kajūji temple in the hills southeast of Kyoto, and finished copying two slim booklets of letters. At the close of each he recorded the date in his own brush: the sixth day of the month for the first volume, the eighth for the second. Those two booklets, kept today at Otani University in Kyoto, are the oldest surviving copy of the Kōya Zōhitsushū, a gathering of correspondence written more than three centuries before Hanga's lifetime by Kūkai, the priest remembered by the posthumous title Kōbō Daishi.

Kūkai (774–835) founded the Shingon school of esoteric Buddhism. In 804 he sailed to Tang China, studied under the master Huiguo in the capital at Chang'an, and returned two years later carrying sutras, ritual implements, and a body of teaching that reshaped Japanese religious life. He later established a monastic center on Mount Kōya, the Kōyasan that gives this collection its name. Most visitors first meet him through doctrine, sculpture, or legend. Here he appears in a plainer guise: a working priest writing to patrons and colleagues about the practical business of his day.

The collection holds seventy-two pieces, most of them letters. It reads as a companion to the Shōryōshū (full title Henjō Hokki Shōryōshū), the canonical anthology of Kūkai's prose and verse assembled by his disciple Shinzei. Because the Kōya Zōhitsushū gathers material left out of that earlier work, it carries the alternate name Shūi Shōryōshū, the "gleanings." Who compiled it, and when, remains unknown. Ten of its seventy-two pieces also appear in the Shōryōshū, and a few may have come from the hands of Kūkai's pupils rather than the master himself.

What the letters record is ordinary and revealing at once. Many concern the copying and spread of the scriptures Kūkai had brought back from China: requests to supporters for materials, notes of thanks for gifts received, inquiries after a friend's illness, words of condolence. Read together with the Shōryōshū, they give historians one of the closest views available of how Kūkai actually lived and thought.

Why This Copy Was Designated

The Kōya Zōhitsushū at Otani University was named an Important Cultural Property on 6 June 1988. In Japan's system for protecting cultural objects, Important Cultural Property is the second rank, set below National Treasure; it marks works judged to hold high historical or artistic value to the nation. The category here is "writings and classical books," and the registered quantity is two booklets.

The distinction that earned this copy its designation is age. The original compilation has not come down to us, and the text survives only through later transcriptions. Among those, the Otani booklets are the earliest known, copied in 1171 when much of Japanese society still counted dates by the reign-era calendar. For scholars reconstructing Kūkai's biography, and for those tracing the history of Chinese-language writing in Japan, an early and carefully made copy carries real weight: it sits closer to the lost source than anything else that remains.

The two volumes divide the material unevenly. The upper booklet contains forty pieces, the lower thirty-two. The lower volume then adds something the title alone would not predict: eighteen further letters by Chinese correspondents such as Xu Gongzhi and Unjo, addressed to the Tang monk Gikū and others. Their inclusion widens the booklets from a private file of one priest's mail into a small archive of cross-cultural exchange across the East China Sea.

What to Look for in the Object

The physical booklets repay close attention. They are bound in the detchōsō style, in which folded leaves are pasted at the fold rather than sewn, a method common for Buddhist texts of the period. The paper is kōzo, made from paper mulberry, and each page was scored with seven pressed ruling lines before writing began. Hanga set down the text in a disciplined regular script of twenty to twenty-four characters a line, generally starting a fresh line for each new letter, though here and there two or three run on without a break.

Look closely and the page carries more than its main text. Red punctuation dots mark the phrasing; red phonetic kana appear occasionally, and the first two leaves of the upper volume add ink kana and red okototen, small reading marks that guided a Japanese reader through classical Chinese. In the upper margins, notes in the same hand as the body cross-reference the Shōryōshū, with jottings such as "found in Shōryōshū, book three." These are the working traces of a careful copyist who treated the text as a scholarly object, not merely a fair copy to be admired.

One feature ties the booklets to a famous place. At the head of each volume sits a red square seal reading "Kōzanji." This is Kōzanji at Toganoo, northwest of Kyoto, the mountain temple linked to the priest Myōe and known to many for its playful scrolls of frolicking animals. Many of Hanga's transcriptions ended up there, and this copy passed through the temple's library before its later history. In the twentieth century it entered the collection of Kanda Kiichirō, an Otani professor who also served as director of the Kyoto National Museum, and from there it came to the university where it rests now.

Around the Museum

The booklets belong to the Otani University Museum, which occupies the ground floor of the Kōru-kan building along the northern edge of the campus. The museum opened in 2003 and holds ten nationally designated Important Cultural Properties, the Kōya Zōhitsushū among them, alongside a deep collection of Buddhist manuscripts and East Asian texts. Access is unusually easy for a treasure of this rank: the museum stands steps from Exit 6 of Kitaōji Station on the Karasuma subway line.

One practical point shapes any visit. Fragile medieval manuscripts cannot stay on permanent view, so the Kōya Zōhitsushū appears only in selected exhibitions rather than year round. The museum runs roughly four themed shows a year plus a special autumn exhibition, and the document has featured in displays devoted to Kūkai-related works. Anyone hoping to see the booklets themselves should check the current exhibition schedule before setting out; admission to the themed shows is free, with a modest charge for special exhibitions.

The Kitaōji area rewards a wider walk. A short stroll west brings you to Daitokuji, a walled compound of Zen sub-temples with celebrated gardens and tea rooms, several open to the public. The Kamo River and the Kyoto Botanical Gardens lie within easy reach to the north, and the subway puts the rest of central Kyoto a few stops away.