Hannya-Ji Temple Sutra Repository

A Small Gabled Hall Behind the Pagoda

The Sutra Repository of Hannya-ji (般若寺経蔵, Hannyaji Kyōzō) stands in Hannyaji-chō in the northern part of Nara City, Nara Prefecture; built in the late Kamakura period, between about 1275 and 1332, it was designated an Important Cultural Property on 20 June 1969. Hannya-ji (般若寺, also written Hannyaji) is a temple of the Shingon Ritsu school, known widely today as the Cosmos Temple.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs record describes the building in a single line of technical shorthand: three bays across the front, two bays deep, one storey, gabled roof, formal ceramic tiling. Translated into what a visitor sees, that means a compact rectangular hall with a straight ridge running its length, tiled in the heavy hongawara system of alternating broad concave pantiles and rounded covering tiles, and no upper floor.

It stands directly behind the great stone pagoda and faces west. Most people arriving at Hannya-ji walk past it. The pagoda holds the eye, the cosmos beds hold the camera, and this low grey-roofed box sits quietly at the back of the frame in a great many photographs taken here without anyone noticing what it is.

The official commentary written when it was designated is unusually blunt about that plainness. It calls the building simple, notes that it stands behind the stone pagoda facing west, dates it to the closing years of the Kamakura period, and then makes its real claim: this is one of very few surviving medieval examples of its kind.

A Building That Began as Something Else

The most interesting thing about the Hannya-ji sutra repository is that it did not begin as a sutra repository.

When the hall was taken apart for repair, the evidence in the timbers showed that the original structure had an earth floor rather than a raised boarded one. Accounts of the findings describe an open, unfloored building, later converted for the storage of scriptures. What it was built for in the first place remains undetermined. Scholarship dates the fabric on stylistic grounds to the Kamakura revival campaign at Hannya-ji, but the function it was designed to serve has not been established.

This matters more than it sounds. A purpose-built sutra repository is a specific thing: raised well off the ground to keep damp away from paper and silk, often shuttered and dark, sometimes fitted with a revolving rinzō cabinet. An earth-floored open hall is close to the opposite. Whatever the original brief was, converting the building meant reversing its relationship to the ground.

Once converted, it did the work of a scripture store. It is credited with holding a printed Yuan-dynasty edition of the Buddhist canon said to have run to some five thousand scrolls, of which several hundred are reported to survive. It also housed a sculpture. The seated Monju Bosatsu riding a lion, now the temple's principal image, made in 1324 by the Kōfuku-ji sculptors Kōshun and Kōjō under the direction of the monk-painter Monkan Kōshin, stood in this building until the main hall was rebuilt in 1667 and the figure was moved across to it.

There is a story attached as well, and it should be treated as a story. The fourteenth-century chronicle Taiheiki relates that Prince Moriyoshi, fleeing from Kasagi toward Yoshino, escaped his pursuers by hiding inside a Chinese-style chest holding scriptures at Hannya-ji. The chest survives at the temple. The connection to this particular hall is traditional rather than documented.

Reading a Rare Medieval Survivor

Japan has plenty of sutra repositories. Almost all of them are Edo-period or later, and a good many are elaborate: octagonal, richly bracketed, built around a revolving cabinet that worshippers turn to acquire the merit of reading the whole canon. Medieval examples are scarce, and that scarcity is the reason a building this modest carries a national designation.

A comparison sits fifteen minutes away by bus. The sutra repository at Kairyūō-ji, also in Nara and also an Important Cultural Property, was built in 1288 and shares almost identical proportions, three bays by two, single storey, tiled. Its roof, though, is hipped rather than gabled. Setting the two side by side in the mind is the quickest way to see how much a roof form changes the character of an otherwise identical box: the hipped roof at Kairyūō-ji closes the building in on all four sides, while the gable at Hannya-ji gives it two blank triangular ends and a strong directional axis running east to west.

The designation date says something too. The pagoda in front was listed in 1902 and the great gate became a National Treasure in 1953. The sutra repository waited until 1969. Buildings that are plain, small and hard to date take longer to be recognised, and it took a proper structural investigation to establish what this one was worth.

For visitors, the hall is seen from outside; the interior is not open. Allow a minute to walk round to the west face, which is the front, and look at how little the building does. No bracket complexes worth the name, no decorative gable ornament, a plain ridge. Then look back at the pagoda, and the contrast between the imported Song stone technique and this piece of ordinary Japanese carpentry becomes the most instructive thing in the precinct.

The grounds are generally open 9:00 to 17:00 with last admission at 16:30, on a shortened schedule in the coldest and hottest months, at 500 yen for adults, 200 yen for junior and senior high school students and 100 yen for elementary school pupils, with higher rates during the flower seasons. Buses from JR Nara and Kintetsu Nara stations reach the Hannyaji stop in about twelve minutes, and the entrance is three to five minutes' walk away. Photography in the open precinct is normally permitted. Hours and fees change from year to year, so confirm them with the temple before travelling.