Jakumuro Motomitsu Bokusei〈Etsuyoshi Character Name Theory

Jakushitsu Genkō's "Ekkei" Scrolls: A Zen Name Painted on Carp Paper

In the autumn of 1366, an old monk living deep in the mountains of Ōmi sat down to write two short scrolls for one of his students. On the first he brushed two large characters: Ekkei (越谿). On the second, in twenty-two lines, he explained what the name meant and why he was giving it. The monk was Jakushitsu Genkō (1290–1367), founder of Eigen-ji and one of the most admired Zen calligraphers of his age. He would die the following autumn, which makes these scrolls one of the last things he ever wrote.

The pair is now an Important Cultural Property held by Taizō-ji, a small temple in Higashiōmi, Shiga Prefecture. Together they are catalogued as Jakushitsu Genkō Bokuseki: The "Ekkei" Style-Name and Its Explanation. The word "bokuseki," literally "ink traces," is the term for calligraphy by a Zen master, valued less as decorative writing than as a direct trace of the mind that brushed it.

What survives here is not a poem or a letter, but something more intimate: the paperwork of a spiritual inheritance, written out by hand.

How a Zen Monk Earns a Second Name

To understand these scrolls, it helps to know how names work in Rinzai Zen. When a monk is ordained, his teacher gives him a religious name, his hōgō. The disciple here received the name Shūgaku (秀格). Later, once a monk's practice has matured and reached a certain rank, the teacher may grant a second, higher name placed above the first: the dōgō, or "way-name." Joined together, the two form the four-character name by which a Zen monk is formally known. Shūgaku's dōgō was Ekkei, and so he became Ekkei Shūgaku.

The second scroll, titled "An Explanation of the Name Ekkei," sets down exactly why. Genkō recalls that Shūgaku had trained under him since youth, by then a full twelve years, devoting himself to the unglamorous work of the temple storehouse and kitchen while remaining calm and unshaken throughout. The old master praises that steadiness, and notes that he grants the name at Shūgaku's own request.

The name itself reaches back to China. Ekkei refers to the Ruoye Stream (若耶溪) in the old region of Yue, a watercourse celebrated by poets, scholars and literati since the Jin and Song dynasties. As the waters of that famous stream run deep, Genkō writes, so may his student's understanding of Zen reach into the depths. He closes by urging Shūgaku to live up to the name and to carry on his orthodox line, and dates the writing to the eighth month of 1366, brushed at his hermitage, the Gankūdai.

There may be a quieter pun at work as well. The Echi River (愛知川), whose gorge runs past Eigen-ji, has historically been written with characters that echo "Ekkei." Curators at the Biwako Bunkakan have suggested that the name nods not only to a stream in distant China but to the very valley where master and disciple lived.

The Paper Is Half the Masterpiece

Look past the calligraphy and the material itself is remarkable. Both scrolls are written on rōsen (蝋牋), a luxury Chinese paper that arrived in Japan by ship. To make it, a sheet was laid over a carved woodblock, coated with wax, and burnished with a boar's tusk or similar tool until the hidden pattern rose to the surface. Here the sheets were dyed a pale indigo, the colour the Japanese call asagi, and the pressed design shows two grass carp nosing among water plants at the centre, framed on all four sides by a border of phoenixes.

The effect is a small painted river. Against that fresh, watery blue, Genkō set down the two characters of Ekkei in a firm, broad-boned hand, large and deliberate and squarely placed. The fish swimming beneath a name that means "river valley" is no accident; calligraphy and paper were chosen to speak to each other.

The dimensions are modest. The name scroll measures about 35.0 by 81.8 centimetres; the explanation scroll, about 35.5 by 82.0. Where the two large characters are weighty and architectural, the twenty-two lines of the explanation run in the fluent, momentum-rich cursive that defines Genkō's everyday brush. Seeing both side by side is part of the pleasure: the same hand working in two registers, the public title and the private letter.

Why It Was Designated an Important Cultural Property

The scrolls were designated an Important Cultural Property on 29 June 1990. Three things make them stand out.

• They preserve, complete and together, both the dōgō and its written explanation, a pairing that rarely survives intact for a single monk.
• They carry the cursive, energetic style of Genkō's mature brush, written within a year of his death.
• They document, in the master's own words, how Zen lineage was actually passed from teacher to disciple, which makes them a historical record as much as a work of art.

That last point matters. Much of what we know about medieval Zen transmission comes from later chronicles. Here the transfer is caught at the moment it happened, in the handwriting of the man performing it.

An Orphan, a Disgraced Warlord, and a Master Who Took Him In

There is a striking human story behind the disciple's name. Ekkei Shūgaku is said to have been the orphaned son of Toki Yoritō (died 1342), military governor of Mino and a capable general who fought under Ashikaga Takauji. Yoritō's career ended in scandal: drunk, he is said to have overturned, or by some accounts shot an arrow at, the ox-carriage of the retired emperor Kōgon, an act of disrespect for which he was beheaded at Rokujō-gawara in Kyoto.

The boy left behind was taken in by Jakushitsu Genkō, who kept him close as an attendant and raised him within the temple. The child of a man executed for insulting the throne grew up to inherit a great teacher's Dharma, become the fifth abbot of Eigen-ji, and found his own temple, Taizō-ji, the very temple that still safeguards these scrolls. Read against that history, the careful, encouraging tone of the "Explanation of Ekkei" reads less like a formality and more like a father writing to a son.

Visiting the World of the Scrolls

The original scrolls are a temple treasure and are not on permanent display. They surface occasionally in special exhibitions; in 2024 they were shown at the Kanpō Museum in Higashiōmi. Shiga Prefecture's new Biwako Bunkakan, a riverboat-shaped museum rising on the lakefront at Hama-Ōtsu, is scheduled to open in December 2027 as a future venue for works like this one. Before planning a trip around the originals, check current exhibition listings.

To stand inside the story, though, go to Eigen-ji. Jakushitsu Genkō founded it in 1361 at the invitation of the Ōmi governor Sasaki (Rokkaku) Ujiyori, and Shūgaku, the recipient of these scrolls, later served as its fifth abbot. The head temple of the Eigen-ji school of Rinzai Zen sits on the wooded right bank of the Echi River, the same gorge that may have inspired the name Ekkei. It is one of the most famous autumn-foliage temples in the Kansai region; in mid-to-late November the maples along the approach turn the climb to the gate into a tunnel of red.

Eigen-ji is reached by Ōmi Railway bus from Yōkaichi Station (about 35 minutes, to the "Eigenji-mae" stop). Admission is typically 500 yen for adults, with hours running roughly 9:00 to 16:00, extended to 8:00–17:00 during the autumn-colour season. The nearby "Three Mountain Temples of Kotō" (Hyakusai-ji, Kongōrin-ji and Saimyō-ji) make it easy to build a full day of temple-going in the hills east of Lake Biwa.