Paperback and Ink Writing on the First Seven Days of the

A Verse Spoken Over Incense, Eight Days After a Founder's Death

When Jakushitsu Genkō, the Zen master who founded Eigenji, sensed the end of his life approaching, he left unambiguous instructions. Return the donated land to the lord. Give the buildings to the local elders. Let the community scatter, and let each monk carry the Buddha's teaching wherever he wandered. He did not want a temple built around his memory.

His disciples chose otherwise. On the eighth day of the ninth month of Jōji 6—1367, a week after his death—they gathered to perform the rites of his first seventh-day memorial. A single sheet of paper, now mounted as a hanging scroll, preserves the verse chanted as incense smoke rose before his image. It is among the oldest surviving records of the moment a grieving community decided that Eigenji would live on.

What the Scroll Records

In Japanese Zen practice, a kōgo (香語) is a short verse pronounced by the presiding master while offering incense at a formal rite, most often a funeral or a memorial service. It does not explain doctrine. It is a compressed, charged utterance meant to express the dead teacher's awakening and the bond between master and heir. The words are spoken once, into smoke and silence, and then they are gone unless someone writes them down.

This scroll did the writing down. Brushed in ink on paper and dated the eighth day of the ninth month, 1367, it carries the verse offered at Jakushitsu's shonanoka (初七日), the first of the weekly services held across the forty-nine days that Buddhist custom reckons after a death. The piece is modest: a single mounted scroll. Its national designation classifies it not as a work of calligraphic art but as a komonjo, a historical document. That distinction is telling. Its worth lies in what it records about the founding of Eigenji, not in the renown of whoever held the brush.

The Master Being Mourned

Jakushitsu Genkō (1290–1367) came from Mimasaka, in what is now Okayama Prefecture. He took the tonsure as a teenager and trained under the Kamakura master Yakuō Tokken, who is said to have given him the name Genkō after dreaming of light spilling across the mountains. In 1320 he sailed to Yuan-dynasty China. At Mount Tianmu he studied under Zhongfeng Mingben, a recluse who taught a "phantom dwelling" ideal of practice: no fixed temple, no rank, a life spent quietly in the hills. Zhongfeng gave him the name Jakushitsu, and that lesson seems to have shaped everything afterward.

Back in Japan, Jakushitsu spent more than three decades avoiding the very prominence the age pressed on accomplished monks. When the court and the Ashikaga shogunate summoned him to head Tenryū-ji in Kyoto and Kenchō-ji in Kamakura, among the most coveted posts in the country, he refused each time. He wore the plain black robe of an ordinary monk to the end. His poems and letters, later gathered as the Jakushitsu-roku, are admired for their austere clarity and left a mark on the Gozan literary tradition.

Only at seventy-one did he accept a settled life, when the Ōmi warlord Rokkaku Ujiyori—also known as Sasaki Ujiyori—gave him a scenic valley called Raikei and built him a temple there in 1361. That temple was Eigenji. Jakushitsu died on the first day of the ninth month of 1367, at seventy-eight. His testament asked his followers to undo everything, yet it also allowed that if people genuinely wished to keep the place as a training hall, that would be acceptable. The disciples took him at that second word.

One Scroll in a Longer Sequence

The seventh-day verse is not an isolated relic. It belongs to a bundled designation known as the Eigenji Founder's Memorial Documents (開山忌関係文書), a set of papers that together trace how the community kept its founder present across the decades. The funeral oration is dated the second day of the ninth month, 1367; this incense verse, the eighth. The sequence continues with a dharma talk for the thirteenth memorial in 1379—the same year the temple's clay portrait statue of Jakushitsu was made—and reaches a verse for the thirty-third memorial in 1399.

Read in order, these documents measure devotion in years rather than days. After Jakushitsu's death, four senior disciples—Miten, Shōrei, Reichū, and Ekkei—took charge of the mountain and carried his austere style forward. The memorial papers are the written trail of that decision. The seventh-day scroll was recognized as an Important Cultural Property on the sixth of May, 1936, and remains in the keeping of Eigenji.

Visiting Eigenji

The scroll itself is a fragile archival object, not part of the everyday temple visit. Documents like this surface only on special occasions, such as the 2016 exhibition marking the 650th anniversary of the founder's death. What rewards a visit is the place the disciples fought to preserve.

Eigenji sits in a wooded valley in Higashiōmi, on the eastern side of Lake Biwa, looking down on the Echi River. As the head temple of the Eigenji branch of Rinzai Zen, it is known across the region for autumn color; the stone-paved approach and the slopes around it fill with maple, and Shiga's tourism office rates the foliage here among the prefecture's finest. The founder's hall, the Daijaku-tō, holds the clay seated portrait of Jakushitsu—itself an Important Cultural Property—carved down to the deep creases of an old man's face. Each year on the first of October the temple holds its kaisan-ki, the founder's memorial. The rite the 1367 scroll first recorded is, in other words, still being kept.