Ink on Paper: Posthumous Warning from the Monk Jakushitsu

A Dying Abbot Who Told His Followers to Leave

When the Zen master Jakushitsu Genkō lay dying at Eigenji in the autumn of 1367, he did not ask his community to protect what he had built. He instructed the opposite. The mountain valley that the warrior-governor Sasaki Ujiyori had granted him was to be returned. The temple buildings were to be handed over to the senior figures of the district. The monks who had gathered around him were to scatter and go their own ways. He set these orders down in writing, added a short parting verse, threw down his brush, and died at the age of seventy-eight.

The paper that carries those instructions still exists. Catalogued as the Jakushitsu Oshō Yuikai, the Admonition of Priest Jakushitsu, it is a single hanging scroll of ink on paper from the Nanbokuchō period, and it is kept at the very temple its author asked his disciples to give up. They refused. The people who had come to study under him decided to remain and continue his teaching, and Eigenji grew into the head temple of its own line of Rinzai Zen.

A yuikai is the written admonition a Zen teacher leaves behind for those who follow him, a counterpart to the death verse, or yuige, that records a master's final state of mind. Most are pious encouragements to keep practicing. Jakushitsu's reads as a refusal of the whole apparatus of an established monastery, which makes the scroll an unusually direct record of one man's idea of what Zen life should be.

The Monk Behind the Brush

Jakushitsu Genkō was born in 1290 at Mimasaka Takata, in present-day Maniwa, Okayama Prefecture. He entered religious life as a boy and trained under Yakuō Tokken, a dharma heir in the line of Rankei Dōryū, the Chinese master who had helped plant Song-dynasty Zen in Kamakura. In 1320 Jakushitsu crossed to Yuan China, where he sought out Zhongfeng Mingben, a hermit-teacher living on Mount Tianmu. Zhongfeng gave him the name Jakushitsu and, more lastingly, a model for how to live: the genjū ideal of staying in quiet mountains and refusing the prestige of large institutions.

He returned to Japan around 1326 and spent the next three decades on the move, opening small temples and then leaving them, walking a circuit that reached as far west as Okayama and as far east as the central provinces. The court and the Ashikaga shogunate tried to install him at the great Kyoto and Kamakura monasteries, Tenryū-ji and Kenchō-ji among them. He declined every time.

The exception came late. In 1360 Sasaki Ujiyori, the military governor of Ōmi Province, offered him a scenic gorge called Raikei in the hills east of Lake Biwa. Jakushitsu accepted, and in 1361, at the age of seventy-one, he founded Eigenji there. Even then he lived as an ordinary monk in plain black robes rather than as the abbot of a powerful house. The dying instructions in the yuikai are the logical end of that life: a man who had spent forty years avoiding institutions trying, with his last breath, not to leave one behind.

Why the Scroll Is Designated

The Jakushitsu Oshō Yuikai was designated an Important Cultural Property on 14 April 1964. In Japan's system this is the tier of national designation immediately below National Treasure: a property judged of high historical or artistic value to the country, though not placed in the very top rank. The scroll is registered under the category of ancient documents rather than calligraphy, a distinction that signals what curators prize most in it. The value lies as much in the words and the moment they record as in their visual form.

That said, Jakushitsu was admired as a brush-master in his own day and remains so. His verses were later gathered into the Jakushitsu-roku, a collection that fed into the Gozan literary movement, the body of Chinese-language poetry and prose produced in Japan's Zen monasteries. Several of his surviving manuscripts and letters carry their own Important Cultural Property listings, and Eigenji holds a cluster of them, including his correspondence and other writings connected to the temple's founding. The yuikai sits among these as the most personal: not a poem composed for an audience, but a set of orders written for the people standing at his deathbed.

Visiting Eigenji

The scroll itself is not on regular display. Like most fragile medieval documents, it is held in the temple's collection and brought out only for occasional special viewings, so a visit to Eigenji is a visit to Jakushitsu's place rather than to the paper he wrote. That place rewards the trip on its own terms.

Eigenji stands above the Echi River in the hills of Higashiōmi, east of Lake Biwa. The stone approach climbs past sixteen rakan figures carved into the rock face, and the slopes around the path are thick with maples. In late November the colour here is reckoned among the best in Shiga, and the temple extends its hours into the early evening to absorb the crowds. The founder's hall, the Daijakutō, holds a seated portrait statue of Jakushitsu, itself an Important Cultural Property, modelled closely enough on the man that the deep lines around the mouth still read as a particular face rather than a type.

The grounds carry other traces of the founder. The temple's main hall is roofed in reeds cut from Lake Biwa and rethatched roughly every decade, and the founder's memorial service, the Kaizanki, falls each year on 1 October. There is a culinary footnote too: Jakushitsu is said to have carried konjac tubers back from China, and the local konnyaku is still sold along the approach. Eigenji opens daily, generally from morning to late afternoon, with extended hours in the autumn foliage season; reach it by Ōmi Railway bus from Yōkaichi Station to the Eigenji-mae stop, or by car from the Yōkaichi interchange on the Meishin Expressway.