Paperback and Ink Calligraphy at Jōrakuji Temple (June 1st

The Temple That Burned, and the Paper That Rebuilt It

On the twenty-sixth day of the third month of 1360, lightning struck the wooded slope of Mount Aboshi in what is now Konan, Shiga. Fire took the main hall, the pagoda, the monks' quarters, more than thirty buildings in all. The principal image of worship was lost in the blaze. A community that traced its founding to the eighth century stood among wet ashes with almost nothing left.

What survives to tell that story is not a building. It is paper.

The kanjinjō of Jōrakuji are three handscrolls written in ink, each one a formal appeal for donations toward the temple's construction. In medieval Japan a kanjinjō was how a temple raised funds: a monk known as a kanjin hijiri would carry such an appeal through the countryside, gathering pledges of money, timber, and labor from believers of every rank. The three Jōrakuji scrolls are dated 1308, 1360, and 1398. Read together, they are the financial and spiritual record of how a ruined temple put itself back together, and they are the reason two of its buildings stand today as National Treasures.

What the Three Scrolls Are

The formal designation reads Shihon bokusho Jōrakuji kanjinjō: ink on paper, three scrolls, classified as ancient documents (komonjo). The bracketed dates in the official title fix each scroll to a month and a year.

The earliest, from the sixth month of 1308, belongs to the Kamakura period, when Jōrakuji still flourished as the head of a cluster of temple halls known as the Aboshiyama Gosenbō. The second, from the seventh month of 1360, is the one written in the immediate aftermath of the fire. The third, from the second month of 1398, dates to the Muromachi period and concerns the rebuilding of the pagoda. Ninety years separate the first scroll from the last.

The set was designated an Important Cultural Property in 1912. Attached to the designation is a single bronze offering vessel inscribed with the year 1320 and the temple's older name, Jōraku-in, a small object that anchors the scrolls to a working medieval temple rather than a legend.

Why They Matter

The 1360 scroll carries the most weight, and not only as a document. After the fire the monks held council and decided to rebuild by public subscription rather than abandon the site. A senior cleric named Kangyō took on the role of kanjin hijiri, and in the seventh month of that same year the appeal was drawn up: a plea to benefactors in all directions to raise the burned halls again, to enshrine a new image, and through that work to pray for the realm and benefit its people.

The language is unguarded. It describes smoke blotting out the daylight as if the sky itself were covering its face at the temple's ruin, and the wind in the cedars sounding like the lament of the people. It then makes a practical request that anyone who has ever run a fundraiser will recognize: refuse no gift for being small. A single sheet of paper, half a coin, a short length of wood, each was to be received as the first basketful of earth in raising a mountain.

That appeal worked. The main hall was finished not long after, and it is the very building that still stands, a broad seven-bay hall in the native wayō style with a cypress-bark roof, rebuilt to such quality that it was named a National Treasure in 1953.

The 1398 scroll does something a historian prizes even more. It records the fundraising for the three-story pagoda, which was completed in 1400. Two roof tiles incised with that later date were found on the structure, so the appeal and the finished tower can be matched within two years of each other. For a medieval wooden building, that kind of precise, paper-backed dating is rare. The scroll turns the pagoda from an undated relic into a securely dated National Treasure.

What to Look For When You Visit

You will not see the scrolls. They are documents kept by the temple, not exhibits. What you can do is stand inside the result of them.

Walk the long wooded approach and the main hall waits at the end, low and wide and dark with age. This is the hall the 1360 appeal paid for. Inside, the structure divides into an outer worship space and an inner sanctuary, the older arrangement that the rebuilders chose to keep. The principal image, a seated thousand-armed Kannon, is a hidden Buddha shown to the public only once every thirty-three years. Ranged around the altar are twenty-eight guardian attendants carved in the Kamakura period, figures that predate the fire and came through it, so that the oldest sculpture in the hall is older than the hall itself.

A flight of stone steps to the side climbs to the pagoda, set higher on the hillside against a wall of trees. Its interior, with a central image of Shaka and painted walls, is not open, but the exterior repays a slow circuit: the building was sited so that a path loops around it and reveals the tiers from changing angles.

Knowing the scrolls changes the quiet. The composure of these buildings is not the calm of a place that was always here. It is the calm of a place that burned to nothing and was rebuilt, one small donation at a time, by people whose request to be remembered is still legible on three rolls of paper.

Around the Temple

Jōrakuji is one of the Konan Sanzan, three Tendai temples in Konan city that each keep National Treasure buildings. Chōjuji, the sister temple historically paired with Jōrakuji and known as the East Temple to Jōrakuji's West, is a fifteen to twenty minute walk away and makes an easy second stop. Zensuiji completes the trio a little further off.

Autumn is the season the area is built around. During the annual Konan Sanzan foliage campaign the three temples open without the advance reservation that is otherwise required, and the maples around the pagoda turn the hillside red. Spring brings azaleas to the same grounds.