Paperback and Ink Ink on the 33rd Anniversary of the

A Sermon Spoken Thirty-Two Years After a Master Died

On the first day of the ninth month of Ōei 6 (1399), the monks of Eigen-ji gathered to mark the day their founder had left them. The date was chosen with care. Jakushitsu Genkō had died on the first of the ninth month in 1367, and his community returned to that same point in the calendar to hold his thirty-third memorial, thirty-two years on. What was spoken in the Dharma Hall that day did not drift away into the rafters. Someone wrote it down. The text was mounted, kept, and handed on, and three scrolls survive today as a designated Important Cultural Property.

The Japanese title is a long one: Shihon bokusho Eigen-ji kaisan sanjūsan-kaiki shōza-go narabini kōgo. Taken apart, it describes the object exactly. Ink on paper (shihon bokusho), recording the words delivered from the high seat (shōza-go) together with the incense verse (kōgo), at the thirty-third memorial for the founder of Eigen-ji.

"Ascending the Seat" and the "Incense Verse"

A formal sermon in a Rinzai Zen temple was a deliberate act. The abbot would ascend the high seat, climbing to the raised platform at the front of the Dharma Hall, and address the assembled monks from there. The Japanese term is shinzo (also read shōza), and the written record of what was said is the shōza-go. At a memorial, the sermon turned toward the dead teacher, holding up his life and his understanding of Zen for the living monks to weigh.

The incense verse, or kōgo, belonged to a separate moment. As incense was offered before the founder's portrait and memorial tablet, the officiant recited a short verse, almost always in literary Chinese. These verses are compact and full of allusion, and they carry the speaker's own debt to the one being honored. Having both the sermon and the incense verse preserved from a single 1399 service is what makes the document worth keeping.

This is liturgy, not private mourning. The scrolls hold the formal, public language by which a Zen community kept its founder present long after his body was gone.

Who Was Jakushitsu Genkō?

Jakushitsu Genkō (1290–1367) was born in what is now Maniwa, in Okayama Prefecture. He took to religious life early, training under Yakuō Tokken, an heir to the line of Rankei Dōryū, the Chinese master who had founded Kenchō-ji in Kamakura. At thirty-one he crossed to Yuan-dynasty China and stayed seven years, seeking out a circle of well-known teachers. The deepest impression was left by Zhongfeng Mingben, a recluse on Mount Tianmu near Hangzhou. Zhongfeng's ideal of the "phantom dwelling," living out one's days in a quiet mountain rather than running a great institution, would steer the rest of Jakushitsu's life. It was Zhongfeng who gave him the name by which he is known.

Home again, he spent more than thirty years declining prominence. He refused repeated summons to lead major temples, Tenryū-ji and Kenchō-ji among them, and lived in small hermitages instead, moving between the western and eastern provinces. The poems and letters of those years were later collected as the Jakushitsu-roku, and his plain, clear verse came to be read well beyond his own circle.

Only at seventy-one did he accept a different sort of offer. Sasaki Ujiyori, military governor of Ōmi Province, gave him a scenic valley in the hills east of Lake Biwa. Eigen-ji was founded there around 1361. Even so, Jakushitsu stayed a plain monk in a black robe and kept his distance from the rank and pageantry of the official Gozan temple network. When he died in 1367 at seventy-eight, his testament asked that the land be returned and the assembly scatter, allowing only that the place might remain as a training hall if people genuinely wished it. They did.

Why the Scrolls Were Designated

The thirty-third memorial scrolls are not an isolated find. They belong to a set of related documents at Eigen-ji that follow the memorial observances for the founder across more than three decades. A funeral eulogy written the day after his death in 1367, an incense verse for the seventh-day rite a week later, a sermon for the thirteenth memorial in 1379, these scrolls for the thirty-third in 1399, and a text marking the enshrinement of his image in the founder's hall. Read in sequence, they show how a founder's memory was institutionalized and how a young Rinzai lineage rooted its identity in it.

As primary records from the Nanboku-chō and Muromachi periods, set down close to the events they describe, they carry genuine historical value. They preserve the actual liturgical language of fourteenth-century Zen, the sermons and verses as spoken, rather than any later digest, and they tie directly to one of the period's notable monk-poets. The Agency for Cultural Affairs designated the document an Important Cultural Property on 6 May 1936. It is classed as an old document (komonjo) and takes the form of three hanging scrolls.

Encountering the Founder's Memory

One honest caution for visitors. Documents of this kind are rarely on view. As a fragile paper treasure, the scrolls are held in storage and brought out only for occasional special exhibitions, never as part of an ordinary temple visit. What you can meet at Eigen-ji is the living world these texts came from.

The founder's hall keeps a seated statue of Jakushitsu, itself an Important Cultural Property, modeled on the master in old age. The creases around the eyes and mouth give it a face that reads as stern and kind at the same time. The community still observes him formally; the founder's memorial, the Kaizan-ki, falls on the first of October. And the valley that is said to have reminded Jakushitsu of Mount Tianmu still wraps around the temple, cut through by the Echi River and known across Shiga for its maples.

Around Eigen-ji

Eigen-ji lies in the hills of Higashiōmi, east of Lake Biwa, and the walk in is half the pleasure. A stone path climbs with the Echi River on one side and a rock face set with stone figures of the sixteen arhats on the other. The maples grow dense near the main gate and before the Gankū-in garden, whose composition borrows the line of the Suzuka mountains behind it.

Autumn is what the temple is known for. The yamamomiji maples turn through November and usually reach their height in the back half of the month, when the grounds open earlier and close later than usual and some evenings are lit. Late April into mid-May brings the other season worth catching, when the new green comes in. The principal image, a hidden Kannon long venerated as the "heir-bearing Kannon," still draws local prayers tied to family continuity.

Give yourself a full day if you can. Hyakusai-ji, one of the three Kotō mountain temples celebrated for autumn color, sits nearby, as does the hilltop shrine of Tarōbō-gū. For afterward, the Hakkō-no-yu hot spring is a short way from the temple.