Remaining Volumes of Mao Shi Zheng's Paper

A Chinese Classic, Copied by Hand in Heian Japan

A single scroll, brittle with age, carries lines of a poetry anthology that was already a thousand years old when the brush touched the paper. This is the Mōshi Teisen Zankan, a surviving portion of the Chinese Classic of Poetry transcribed in Japan during the Heian period and kept at Dainenbutsu-ji, a temple in the Hirano district of Osaka. The word zankan means a remaining fragment: what we have today is part of what was once a longer text, and that incompleteness is itself part of the object's story.

The scroll holds the section of the anthology known as the "Airs," the folk songs of the ancient Chinese states. Reading it asks for two layers of context at once. One is the Chinese learning that a Heian court scholar would have absorbed. The other is the look of the brushwork, which carries the dignity of a much older copying tradition.

The Text Behind the Scroll

The Classic of Poetry (Shijing in Chinese, Shikyō in Japanese) is the oldest collection of Chinese verse, gathering roughly three hundred poems that range from court hymns to songs of farmers and lovers. It became one of the Five Classics at the core of Confucian education, which meant that for centuries every serious student in China, Korea, and Japan was expected to know it.

The version that survived into later ages is the Mao recension, named for the Han-dynasty scholars who transmitted it. To this base text a second scholar, Zheng Xuan (127–200), added his own annotations. Zheng was the most influential classicist of the Later Han, a man who spent his life reconciling competing schools of commentary, and his notes on the poems are called the jian (sen in Japanese). The title Mōshi Teisen names both layers: the Mao text and Zheng's commentary, copied together as students would have studied them.

The portion preserved on this scroll comes from the "Airs of the States," the first and most approachable of the anthology's three divisions. These are short poems rooted in everyday life, and they were read both as literature and, in the Confucian manner, as moral lessons drawn from the customs of each region.

Why It Is a National Treasure

The scroll was designated a National Treasure on 22 November 1952, in the category of calligraphy and classical texts. The reasons turn less on the words, which any printed edition can supply, than on the manuscript itself.

Very few hand-copied Chinese classics from this early period survive in Japan, and fewer still in a state good enough to study. The brushwork is the heart of the matter. Specialists place it close to the sutra-copying style of the Nara period, the formal, evenly weighted hand used by professional scribes in the eighth century. That archaic flavour suggests the copy was made before the middle of the Heian period, when Japanese calligraphy began to soften into more personal styles. The Osaka City Museum of Fine Arts, which now holds the scroll on deposit, dates it to the eleventh or twelfth century.

A manuscript like this also matters to scholars of the Chinese text. Printed editions standardised the wording over the centuries, sometimes silently correcting it. An early hand copy can preserve readings that later printings smoothed away, which makes the scroll a witness to how the poems were actually transmitted across the sea.

The Michizane Question

Temple tradition holds that the scroll was written by Sugawara no Michizane (845–903), the Heian scholar and statesman who, after a bitter political downfall, came to be worshipped as Tenjin, the deity of learning and calligraphy. It is an attractive claim, since Michizane was remembered as one of the finest brushes of his age.

The dating tells against it. If the copy was made in the eleventh or twelfth century, it was produced more than a hundred years after Michizane died. The attribution is best understood as an expression of his later cult rather than a record of his hand, and in this the scroll keeps company with other works once linked to him: of the pieces traditionally signed to Michizane, none has been confirmed as genuinely his. Knowing this does not diminish the object. It shows instead how a famous name attaches itself to a beautiful old manuscript, and how veneration and connoisseurship can pull in different directions.

Seeing the Scroll, and Visiting Dainenbutsu-ji

Anyone hoping to stand in front of the actual scroll should set expectations carefully. Like most fragile manuscripts of its rank, it is not on permanent view. It is held on deposit at the Osaka City Museum of Fine Arts and appears only on special occasions, such as a major National Treasure exhibition. Checking exhibition schedules in advance is the only reliable way to catch it.

The temple that owns it rewards a visit on its own terms. Dainenbutsu-ji is the head temple of the Yūzū Nenbutsu school of Pure Land Buddhism and traces its founding to 1127, when the monk Ryōnin established what is often called Japan's first hall dedicated to nenbutsu practice. Its main hall is the largest wooden building in Osaka Prefecture, a broad-roofed structure that anchors a precinct of some thirty buildings.

The temple is best known for the Manbu Oneri, held each year from 1 to 5 May. In this rite, members of the community dress as the twenty-five bodhisattvas and process slowly across a bridge into the hall, re-enacting the welcome of the soul into the Pure Land. The procession was registered as an Intangible Folk Cultural Property by the City of Osaka in 2002 and draws crowds that fill the grounds. On the sixteenth of January, May, and September, the temple also holds its great rosary-turning rite, the hyakumanben.