Daito Kokushi Calligraphy〈Keirin〈Nangoku-Hen〉

Two Scrolls, One Unrestrained Brush

The brush rarely lifts from the paper. Chinese characters link into running chains of cursive script, swelling and thinning as the ink runs dry, then surging again with a fresh charge. This is the Daito Kokushi Bokuseki known as the Keirin and Nangaku Verses, a pair of hanging scrolls written by Shuho Myocho (1282–1337), the Zen monk who founded Daitokuji temple in Kyoto. The pair was designated a National Treasure on June 22, 1955, and belongs to the Masaki Art Museum in Tadaoka, a small coastal town south of Osaka.

A word about the genre helps here. Bokuseki, literally "ink traces," refers to calligraphy brushed by Zen monks. Unlike courtly calligraphy, which prized elegance and lineage-correct technique, bokuseki was valued as a direct imprint of the writer's spiritual attainment. From the sixteenth century onward, tea masters hung these works in the alcoves of their tea rooms, and a scroll by a revered monk became one of the most coveted objects in Japanese art. Within that tradition, the writing of Shuho Myocho, honored after his death with the imperial title Daito Kokushi (National Teacher of the Great Lamp), has long been ranked at the very top.

Each of the two scrolls transcribes a gatha, a Buddhist verse, composed by the Chinese master Xutang Zhiyu (1185–1269), a towering figure of Southern Song dynasty Chan (Zen). The verses appear in the first volume of the Recorded Sayings of Xutang. Myocho never met Xutang, but the connection was personal all the same: his own teacher, Nanpo Jomyo, had traveled to China and received dharma transmission directly from Xutang. By copying his dharma grandfather's words in his own hand, Myocho was affirming the lineage he carried.

One more practical note. The official register of the Agency for Cultural Affairs writes the title with the character 獄 (Nangaku-ge), while the museum and most publications use the homophone 嶽, referring to Mount Nanyue in China. Both point to the same work.

Why the Pair Became a National Treasure

Myocho's standing in Japanese Zen is hard to overstate. Born in Harima province (present-day Hyogo prefecture), he trained under Nanpo Jomyo and received his teacher's sanction at the age of twenty-five. In 1326 he founded Daitokuji in the Murasakino district of Kyoto, a temple that would later shape the world of tea through figures such as Ikkyu Sojun and the priests who advised Sen no Rikyu. Both Emperor Hanazono and Emperor Go-Daigo became his devoted students, an extraordinary double patronage in an age when the two courts were rivals. His disciple Kanzan Egen went on to found Myoshinji, today the largest branch of Rinzai Zen.

Because so many later masters of the tea world traced their religious ancestry back to him, Myocho's bokuseki acquired an authority no other Japanese monk's writing could match. Several of his works hold National Treasure status, including the Kandoku Shinsen Bo at Shinjuan, the certificate of enlightenment at Myoshinji, and the Kanzan name scroll of 1329.

What sets the Masaki pair apart is the script itself. Both scrolls are written in linked cursive, a style in which successive characters flow together without the brush leaving the paper. Scholarship on Zen calligraphy notes that cursive writing of this sustained quality was rare in fourteenth-century Japan; the pair reaches a level few contemporaries approached. The two verses share no thematic connection, yet the brushwork is so consistent that researchers consider them to have been written around the same time. The museum's own commentary describes the hand as bold and imposing, a writer hurling his entire self at the paper.

Reading the Verses, Watching the Brush

The Keirin Verse (Valley Forest Verse) opens onto a late-autumn scene and turns it into a problem of perception: how difficult it is to grasp things exactly as they are and hold that suchness as a koan. The Nangaku Verse takes the opposite register, invoking the vast silhouettes of Mount Nanyue and Huading Peak in China and overlaying their grandeur with the figure of the emperor of the day.

You do not need to read classical Chinese to feel the difference between the two moods. Stand back and follow the columns as rhythm rather than text. Notice where the ink is wet and heavy, where it splits into dry, fibrous streaks called kasure, and where a single connected stroke carries three or four characters before the brush reloads. The variation is not decoration. In Zen aesthetics it reads as breath, the trace of a particular body on a particular day nearly seven hundred years ago.

The provenance adds a chapter of modern drama. The scrolls descended through the Konoike family, the great Osaka merchant house, and passed into the hands of collector Masaki Takayuki (1895–1985) amid the upheaval that followed the Second World War. The museum regards the pair as the crowning piece of its entire collection.

Visiting the Masaki Art Museum and Around

Masaki Takayuki, a local landowner and devoted student of tea, opened the museum in November 1968 to share what he had gathered over a lifetime: roughly 1,300 works centered on medieval ink painting and Zen calligraphy, including three National Treasures and thirteen Important Cultural Properties. He designed the quiet exhibition buildings himself.

Plan ahead, because access is seasonal. The museum mounts two exhibitions a year, in spring and autumn, and closes entirely between them. The Keirin and Nangaku scrolls appear only occasionally, when an exhibition theme calls for them; recent showings include the museum's own 2022 and 2024 exhibitions and the 2017 tea-ceremony exhibition at the Tokyo National Museum. Check the schedule on the museum website before traveling. Opening hours during exhibitions are 10:00 to 16:30 (last entry 16:00), closed Mondays unless the Monday is a national holiday, in which case the following day is closed. Admission is 700 yen for adults, 500 yen for high school and university students, and 300 yen for younger children. On weekends and holidays during exhibition periods, part of the adjoining Masaki Memorial Residence, a registered tangible cultural property with tea rooms, opens to visitors.

The town itself is a curiosity: Tadaoka is often cited as the smallest town in Japan by area, at roughly four square kilometers between the Nankai railway line and Osaka Bay. The museum sits in an ordinary residential street about fifteen minutes on foot from Tadaoka Station on the Nankai Main Line, around thirty minutes from Namba in central Osaka. A taxi from Izumiotsu Station, one stop north and served by express trains, takes about seven minutes.

If you want to build a day around old art in southern Osaka, the Kuboso Memorial Museum of Arts in neighboring Izumi City holds two National Treasures of its own, and the Osaka Prefectural Museum of Yayoi Culture in Izumi covers the region's prehistoric rice-farming culture. Kansai International Airport is about twenty-five minutes away by train, which makes the museum a workable first or last stop on a Japan itinerary.