Documents Related to Chisho Daishi (93 Copies) / Catalog of

A Ninth-Century Passport That Outlived Its Empire

In the third month of 855, an office in the Chinese prefecture of Yuezhou issued a travel permit to a foreign monk and pressed an official seal onto the paper. The empire that produced that document, Tang China, would collapse within decades and lose most of its records. The permit survived. It is kept today at Onjo-ji, a mountain temple above Lake Biwa in Otsu, Shiga Prefecture, as part of a group of papers known as the Documents and Records Related to Chisho Daishi.

The monk who carried the permit was Enchin (814 to 891). He was born in Sanuki Province, in what is now Kagawa Prefecture, climbed Mount Hiei at fifteen to study under the first head of the Tendai school, and in 853 sailed for China to seek the most advanced Buddhist learning of the age. He spent roughly five years there before returning in 859. After his death he was given the posthumous title Chisho Daishi, and he is remembered as the fifth head abbot of the Tendai order and the founding patriarch of its Jimon branch, which still has its head temple at Onjo-ji.

The National Treasure that bears his name is not a single object. It is an archive of ninety-three documents, mounted across fifty-one handscrolls, two albums, and one portfolio case, with an appended catalog of six further documents in three scrolls. Some are in Enchin's own hand. Many were written by others: Tang officials, Japanese court scribes, the monks who certified his training. Together they form the foundational source material for almost everything we know about him.

Why It Became a National Treasure

The archive was designated a National Treasure in 1963, with further documents folded into the designation in 2023. Its value rests on two things: rarity and reach.

The rarity is concrete. Two of the documents are kasho, the travel passes that the Tang state issued to control movement along its roads. Permits of this kind were standard administrative paper, produced in large numbers and almost never kept. Fragments have been dug out of the sands at Turfan in the twentieth century, but as originals handed down continuously from one generation to the next, the two passes that Enchin brought home are the only examples left anywhere in the world.

The reach is historical. A kasho recorded the issuing office, the traveler and his attendants by name, age, and status, the goods they carried, and the purpose of the journey, all confirmed by signatures and a stamped seal. Read closely, Enchin's passes reconstruct both his route through China and the machinery of a state that tracked every foreigner crossing its barriers and river fords. The wider archive adds the rest of the picture: catalogs of the texts he sought, certificates recording the teachings transmitted to him, and official Japanese papers concerning his rank. Few sources document a single journey of cultural exchange between two countries in this kind of detail.

In 2023 this body of material, joined with related holdings at the Tokyo National Museum, was inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World register as a record of ninth-century cultural exchange between Japan and China. Onjo-ji and the museum had applied jointly.

What to Look For

The first pass, issued by the Yuezhou prefectural government on the nineteenth day of the third month of 855, measures 30.9 by 44.0 centimeters. It granted Enchin leave to set out from the Kaiyuan-ji temple in Yuezhou toward the capital and the sacred mountains and to return, asking the officials at the barriers and ferries along the way to let him pass unhindered. The second pass dates from the eleventh month of the same year and was issued not by a regional office but by the Shangshu-sheng, the central Department of State Affairs, for his return leg.

Stand in front of either sheet and the small human details surface: the brushwork of a clerk a thousand years gone, the placement of a vermilion seal, the worn fibers of paper that crossed the sea twice. These are working documents, not art objects, and that is the point of them.

Because the originals are extremely fragile, they are shown only on a rotating and occasional basis. A selection of the archive is displayed at the temple's Cultural Property Repository, the small museum on the Onjo-ji grounds. Anyone hoping to see a specific document, especially one of the passes, should check what is currently on view before traveling.

Around Onjo-ji

The temple rewards a half-day even apart from its documents. Its main hall, the Kondo, is a National Treasure in its own right, and its Kannon-do is the fourteenth stop on the Saigoku pilgrimage of thirty-three Kannon temples. The bell of Onjo-ji, counted among the Eight Views of Omi as the evening bell, hangs in a tower near the hall. The name Mii-dera, by which the temple is widely known, comes from a spring on the grounds said to have provided the first bath water for three early emperors; the water still bubbles up inside its small shrine.

The wooded slope fills with around a thousand cherry trees in spring, lit after dark during the blossom season, and turns to color in autumn. Onjo-ji sits a short walk from Lake Biwa on the edge of Otsu, an easy day trip from Kyoto.

To reach it, take the Keihan Ishiyama-Sakamoto line to Miidera Station, about a seven to ten minute walk away, or ride a Keihan bus from JR Otsu or Otsukyo stations and get off at the Miidera stop. Admission to the grounds is 600 yen for adults, with reduced rates for students; the Cultural Property Repository charges a separate fee. The grounds are generally open from 9:00 to around 16:30, with last entry before closing.