Gyokuhenmaki No. 27 (second Half)

A Tang Scroll That Preserves a Dictionary China Lost

Read down this scroll and you meet each Chinese character twice. First it appears large, written out as a headword. Then a tight column of smaller script follows, spelling out how the character sounds and gathering its meanings from older books. This is a page from a dictionary, and a very old one.

The book is the Yupian (read Gyokuhen in Japanese), a Chinese character dictionary compiled in 543 by the scholar Gu Yewang during the short-lived Liang dynasty. In its complete form it ran to thirty volumes and gathered more than nine thousand characters, each filed under a radical, the shared graphic element that classical dictionaries use to organize the writing system. That arrangement descends from the Shuowen Jiezi of the first century and its scheme of 540 radicals.

The scroll at Ishiyama-dera is the latter half of volume 27. The text on it is not from the Liang court at all. It is a hand-copy made centuries later in Tang-dynasty China, then carried across the sea to Japan. The portion held here covers characters under the silk-thread radical 糸 and the radical 索, words for cords, fibers and woven things. The silk-thread section does not begin on this scroll. It continues from the first half of volume 27, which is kept at Kōzan-ji in Kyoto. The two halves were once a single roll, divided at some later date.

Why a Chinese Manuscript Is a Japanese National Treasure

The strange thing about the Yupian is that it no longer exists in the form Gu Yewang gave it. In 1013, Song-dynasty editors led by Chen Pengnian reworked the dictionary into a shorter edition, the Daguang yihui Yupian, trimming away most of the original quotations and detailed glosses. That abridgment is the version that survived in China. Gu Yewang's full text, with its dense citations, vanished there.

It survived in Japan. A small number of Tang-period copies, brought over by monks and envoys, preserve the dictionary in its original detailed shape, the form scholars call the genpon Gyokuhen, or "original-text Yupian." Four of these portions are designated National Treasures: volume 9 at Waseda University in Tokyo, the complete volume 22 at Ise Jingū, and the two halves of volume 27 split between Kōzan-ji and this scroll at Ishiyama-dera.

Their value runs deeper than rarity. Gu Yewang's glosses quote heavily from earlier classics and commentaries, and many of those source texts have since been lost everywhere. Read closely, the dictionary becomes a reservoir of vanished Chinese literature, holding lines that survive nowhere else. For anyone reconstructing the history of the Chinese language, or recovering books that disappeared more than a thousand years ago, these scrolls are primary evidence. The Agency for Cultural Affairs designated this one a National Treasure on 29 March 1952.

The back of the paper carries its own clue. Sometime in the early tenth century, after the scroll reached Japan, a scribe used its blank reverse to copy out an Esoteric Buddhist text. The national database records this verso text as the Nyoirin Dharani Sutra, while Ishiyama-dera identifies the reverse writing as the Goma kamon rokushu, a set of six commentaries on rites for the Nyoirin Kannon. Either way the writing is Esoteric Buddhist, and it ties the scroll to the very deity enshrined as the temple's principal image. It also fixes a date: by the time that copying was done, the dictionary had already crossed to Japan and was still a single, undivided roll.

What There Is to See, and What to Look For

A word of honesty for anyone hoping to stand in front of the scroll itself. It is essentially never exhibited. There is no real record of public display, which is normal for a fragile thousand-year-old paper manuscript that conservators keep in the dark.

What the temple does open is its treasure hall, the Hōjōden, during the spring and autumn runs of the "Ishiyama-dera and Murasaki Shikibu" exhibition. The displays rotate, and the temple draws on a deep holding of scriptures and manuscripts that has earned it the nickname "the Shōsōin of Ōmi." In 2025 the temple put the reverse side of this very scroll, the Goma commentary, on view. Catching the dictionary itself would be a rare piece of luck, but the exhibitions are the place where it could happen.

If you ever do see an original-text Yupian, or a good reproduction, look for the two-size layout that opens this article: the bold headword, then the fine column of sound and sense beneath it. Look too for the brushwork. These are the hands of Tang copyists, the same disciplined manuscript culture that produced the sutras of the era. On the Ishiyama-dera scroll, the run of silk-thread characters is a thread of a different kind, joining this half to its sibling in Kyoto.

Around Ishiyama-dera

The scroll lives at one of the most atmospheric temples in the country. Ishiyama-dera sits on the western bank of the Seta River, where Lake Biwa drains south, in the city of Ōtsu. A head temple of the Tōji branch of Shingon Buddhism, it was founded in the Nara period, by tradition in 747, by the monk Rōben at the wish of Emperor Shōmu. Its principal image is a Nyoirin Kannon kept as a hidden Buddha and shown only once every thirty-three years.

The name "Stone Mountain Temple" is literal. The main hall, the oldest wooden building in Shiga and a National Treasure, is built directly on a great outcrop of wollastonite, a pale crystalline rock so unusual it is a designated natural monument. Above the hall stands a two-storied pagoda, also a National Treasure and reckoned the oldest of its kind in Japan, traditionally said to have been donated by Minamoto no Yoritomo in 1194. The connection most visitors come for is literary: Murasaki Shikibu is said to have begun writing The Tale of Genji here, and the view of the autumn moon over the river became one of the celebrated Eight Views of Ōmi.

Getting there is easy from Kyoto. A rapid train reaches JR Ishiyama in about thirteen minutes, and a short bus ride ends at the temple gate. The Keihan Ishiyama-Sakamoto line stops at Ishiyamadera Station, a walk of roughly ten to fifteen minutes from the grounds. The temple gardens are known for plum and cherry in spring and for vivid maples in late autumn, when evening illuminations light the slopes.