Lotus Sutra Booklet on Paper with Colored Fans (ninety Eight

A Sutra Copied onto Folding Fans

Open one of the five booklets kept at Shitennoji Temple in Osaka and the page spreads into the unmistakable silhouette of a folding fan. Beneath lines of twelfth-century calligraphy, a painted world appears: court ladies in layered robes, a vendor calling out in a market, children at play, grasses bending in the wind. The text above them is the Lotus Sutra, the most revered scripture of Heian-period Japan. The pictures below have nothing to do with it.

This is the Senmen Hokekyo Sasshi, formally designated as the "Fan-Shaped Lotus Sutra Booklets on Colored Paper (Ninety-Eight Leaves)." Each leaf began as a fan paper, painted, folded along its center crease, and pasted back to back with its neighbors in a binding technique called detchoso, in which the folded sheets are glued rather than sewn. Onto these decorated surfaces, several different hands copied the scripture in flowing, Japanese-style script.

The set originally comprised ten booklets: the eight scrolls of the Lotus Sutra itself, preceded by the Sutra of Innumerable Meanings and followed by the Sutra on the Contemplation of the Bodhisattva Samantabhadra, the customary opening and closing texts. Scholars estimate the complete set used around 115 fan sheets. Today Shitennoji preserves five booklets totaling ninety-eight leaves: scrolls one, six, and seven of the Lotus Sutra together with the two framing sutras. A sixth booklet, scroll eight, belongs to the Tokyo National Museum and holds its own National Treasure designation, while loose fragments are scattered among various collections.

No date or signature survives on the booklets. Based on the painting style and the costumes and customs depicted, the prevailing scholarly view places their production around the middle of the twelfth century, in the final decades of the Heian period. One tradition holds that they were dedicated to Shitennoji by Kayanoin, a consort of Retired Emperor Toba, and art historians generally consider the commission to have come from women connected to the imperial court. The Lotus Sutra explicitly teaches that women can attain buddhahood, which made it the scripture of choice for female patrons, and lavishly decorated copies were a recognized act of devotion in this era.

Why These Booklets Are a National Treasure

The booklets were designated a National Treasure on June 9, 1951, in the painting category, registration number 21. That an object classified as scripture sits in the painting category says much about where its value lies.

Almost no secular painting survives from the Heian period. Temples preserved religious imagery; pictures of ordinary life, painted on perishable fans and screens for daily enjoyment, simply wore out and disappeared. Because the makers of these booklets recycled actual fan papers, or papers prepared in the fan format then in fashion, the set preserves the only substantial record of what Heian fan painting looked like. For historians of Japanese genre painting, there is no comparable source.

The technique rewards close attention. The papers were coated with powdered mica to give them a pearly sheen, then scattered with cut flakes of gold and silver foil. Parts of the underdrawings were printed from woodblocks, an unusually early use of printing for pictorial work in Japan, while other passages were drawn freehand in ink; thick mineral pigments were then applied over both. Aristocratic figures follow the courtly hikime kagibana convention, with slit-line eyes and hooked noses, but the serving women, peddlers, and townspeople are rendered with a liveliness and individuality rare in art of this date.

Each booklet's cover carries a painting of the Ten Rakshasis, the female guardian deities of the Lotus Sutra, dressed not in Indian or Chinese fashion but in the robes of Japanese court women. Even the protectors of the scripture have been naturalized into the Heian world.

The deliberate mismatch between sacred text and worldly image has fascinated scholars for over a century. Whatever its original logic, the pairing left a document in which faith and daily life share the same page, and it shows how thoroughly aesthetic pleasure had entered the religious practice of the late Heian aristocracy.

What to Look For

Among the most celebrated leaves is a market scene, in which sellers and customers haggle among displayed goods. Heian literature describes such markets, but almost nothing else shows one. Other leaves depict women drawing water, nobles at leisure, seasonal flowers, and birds in flight, each composition adapted with real skill to the awkward arc of the fan shape.

Look also at the calligraphy itself. The sutra text is written in a dignified yet supple hand, and several writers can be distinguished across the set. Where the dark ink crosses a painted figure, the two layers seem to negotiate for space; sometimes the text appears to float above the scene like weather.

One leaf carries a painting of kaji, the paper mulberry whose leaves were used for writing wishes at the Tanabata star festival. A kaji tree grows in front of the Shitennoji treasure house in quiet reference to it, a small detail worth noticing on your way in.

The booklets are fragile and light-sensitive, so they are not on permanent view. The treasure house, called the Homotsukan, rotates its displays through several themed exhibitions each year, typically at New Year, in spring, and in autumn, and selected leaves of the fan sutras appear regularly in these rotations. On some occasions a facsimile stands in for the original, and individual booklets travel to special exhibitions at museums in Japan. Checking the temple's exhibition schedule before visiting is essential if seeing the original is your priority.

Visiting Shitennoji and the Surrounding Area

Shitennoji itself is reason enough for the trip. Founded in 593 by Prince Shotoku, it is regarded as the first state-sponsored Buddhist temple in Japan, predating the great monasteries of Nara by over a century. The temple belongs to no single Buddhist school and is headquarters of the independent Washu denomination, a reflection of its origin in an age before Japanese sects existed. Fires and wars destroyed the original buildings repeatedly; the present central precinct is a postwar reconstruction that faithfully follows the ancient Shitennoji-style layout, with the central gate, five-story pagoda, main hall, and lecture hall aligned on a single north-south axis. The stone torii at the western entrance, erected in 1294, is an Important Cultural Property and one of the oldest stone torii in Japan.

The treasure house stands on the east side of the central precinct. Admission for adults is 500 yen, with the temple grounds themselves open free of charge from early morning. On the 21st and 22nd of each month, flea-market fairs fill the precinct with antique stalls and food vendors, a scene that echoes, eight centuries on, the market leaf inside the treasure house.

The temple sits in the Tennoji district of southern Osaka. Shitennoji-mae Yuhigaoka Station on the Tanimachi subway line is about a five-minute walk from the north gate; JR Tennoji Station is roughly twelve minutes on foot. From Tennoji you can continue to Abeno Harukas, one of Japan's tallest skyscrapers, with an observation deck overlooking the temple roofs, or to Tennoji Park, its zoo, and the landscaped Keitakuen garden. Isshinji Temple, known for its strikingly modern gate, is a short walk west.