The Lotus Sutra, Preface (Chikubushima Sutra)

A Heian Sutra of Birds and Gold

The single folded album is no taller than a forearm, yet across its pale paper drift birds, butterflies, and sprays of flowering plants laid down in gold and silver. This is the Hokekyō Jobon, the Introduction chapter of the Lotus Sutra, copied in the eleventh century and known today as the Chikubushima Sutra (Chikubushima-kyō). The name comes from Chikubushima, a small wooded island in the north of Lake Biwa, where the work was kept for centuries at the temple of Hōgon-ji.

The sutra once ran to many volumes. Only two chapters survive, both cut from the first scroll. Hōgon-ji holds this Introduction chapter, mounted as an orihon, a folding album that opens like an accordion. The companion piece, the Hōbenbon or Expedient Means chapter, is kept at the Tokyo National Museum in the form of a handscroll. Both carry the same status and were recognized on the same day.

Why It Matters

The album was named a National Treasure on March 20, 1954. Its importance lies in what it reveals about an early moment in Japanese sutra decoration. By the Heian period, copying the Lotus Sutra had become an act of devotion in its own right, because the text repeatedly promises spiritual merit to those who reproduce it. Wealthy patrons turned that act into lavish craft, and the decorated sutra, or sōshokukyō, took shape.

The Chikubushima Sutra belongs to the early phase of that tradition. Its maker ruled the plain paper with fine lines of gold ink, then scattered under-drawings across it in gold and silver: birds in flight, butterflies, bracken fronds, the imaginary blossoms called hōsōge, and drifting lingzhi clouds. Over this the text was written in a calm, even regular script. Set beside the dense splendor of later works such as the Heike Nōkyō, the restraint here feels deliberate and quietly confident.

A postscript adds another layer of history. In 1627 the monk and celebrated calligrapher Shōkadō Shōjō examined the album and judged the brushwork to be that of Minamoto no Toshifusa, a court noble who lived from 1035 to 1121. The attribution is traditional rather than proven, yet it shows how highly the calligraphy was prized by later connoisseurs.

What to Look For

Seen up close, the appeal of the album is in its balance. The gold and silver drawings never crowd the characters; they sit lightly in the margins and between the columns, so the eye moves easily from ornament to text and back. The silver, now tarnished in places, once shimmered against the white ground, and its contrast with the warmer gold would have shifted as the light moved.

One practical point is worth knowing before any trip. The album is not shown on Chikubushima. It is on long-term deposit at the Nara National Museum, which puts it on display only on occasion, usually within a special exhibition. Anyone hoping to stand before the original should check the museum’s schedule first. A visit to the island, by contrast, offers the place the sutra came from rather than the object itself.

Visiting Chikubushima

Chikubushima sits in the northern reach of Lake Biwa, a forested rock about two kilometers around, with no residents and no cars. Passenger ferries run by Biwako Kisen reach it from Nagahama and Imazu in roughly thirty minutes, and a lake-crossing route links the two ports by way of the island. Visitors pay a boarding fare plus an island entry fee, and time ashore is set by the ferry timetable, so most people have around ninety minutes on the island.

Hōgon-ji is the thirtieth temple on the Saigoku pilgrimage of thirty-three Kannon sites, and it enshrines a famous image of Benzaiten. Even without the sutra on view, the grounds reward the climb. The Karamon, a Chinese-style gate that is itself a National Treasure, was restored in 2020 and is said to be the last surviving fragment of a bridge from Osaka Castle. A covered passage called the Funa-rōka, built partly from timber said to come from a ship of Toyotomi Hideyoshi, links the Kannon hall to the neighboring Tsukubusuma Shrine, whose main hall is also a National Treasure. At the lakeside many visitors try kawarake-nage, tossing small clay discs through a torii gate for luck.

The mainland ports reward time of their own. Nagahama keeps the preserved merchant streets of Kurokabe Square and a lakeside castle, while Imazu is the gateway to the much-photographed avenue of metasequoia trees at Makino.