Shaku-Makayenron

A Tang-Dynasty Commentary Kept on the Seta River

Among the manuscripts held at Ishiyama-dera, a temple beside the Seta River in Shiga Prefecture, are five accordion-folded booklets written in Chinese characters during China's Tang dynasty (618–907). Together they carry a single Buddhist work, the Shaku Makaen Ron, known in Chinese as the Shi Moheyan Lun. The text is a commentary on the Awakening of Faith in the Mahayana, one of the most influential treatises in East Asian Buddhism, and the copy at Ishiyama-dera counts among the few examples to survive on paper from the Tang period itself.

The commentary presents itself as the work of Nagarjuna, the Indian philosopher of the second or third century whose ideas shaped much of later Mahayana thought. Few scholars now accept that claim. The ninth-century Japanese monk Annen recorded in his Shittanzo that the work was composed by a figure named Wolchung from the kingdom of Silla, on the Korean peninsula. Current opinion places its composition somewhere in Tang China or Silla during the seventh or eighth century, several hundred years after Nagarjuna lived. The full text runs to ten volumes; here it has been bound into five folding booklets.

Why It Became a National Treasure

Paper does not last. Manuscripts from the Tang dynasty rarely survive in China, where war, fire, and the passage of centuries destroyed most of what was written there. A surprising number of the oldest Chinese Buddhist texts that remain today were carried to Japan by traveling monks and then kept in temple storehouses, copied and recopied, held dry and dark. The Shaku Makaen Ron at Ishiyama-dera belongs to that long work of preservation. It was designated a National Treasure on June 27, 1959, recognized for its age as a Tang manuscript and for the importance of the text it records.

The work is more than a line-by-line gloss. Where the Awakening of Faith sorts reality into two aspects, an absolute "gate of suchness" and a conditioned "gate of arising and ceasing," the Shaku Makaen Ron sets out its own scheme, dividing the teaching into an absolute principle it calls the "non-dual mahayana" and a body of thirty-two relative categories. Building an independent framework on top of a canonical text was bold, and it is one reason the commentary drew readers across centuries and borders.

In Japan the work found an unlikely champion. Kukai, who founded the Shingon school of esoteric Buddhism in the early ninth century, read the idea of the non-dual mahayana as an expression of esoteric teaching and placed the commentary among the texts his school studied. Other Japanese scholars were less persuaded and argued openly that the attribution to Nagarjuna could not be true. Studied, doubted, and defended by turns, the text earned a place in the intellectual history of Buddhism in East Asia.

What Rewards a Closer Look

This is a written work, not a sculpture or a hall, and few visitors come to read it. What repays attention is the object: disciplined columns of Tang-period brushwork, paper worn soft by more than a thousand years, a document that crossed from the Chinese mainland and was kept safe through generations of monks. Seeing it, you are looking at the actual surface a Tang-era hand wrote upon, not a later copy.

Like most fragile manuscripts, the Shaku Makaen Ron is not on permanent view. Ishiyama-dera keeps its written holdings in storage and shows selections during the spring and autumn exhibitions held at the Hojoden, the treasure hall set on higher ground within the precinct. Whether this particular work appears in a given season depends on the exhibition theme, so anyone hoping to see it should check the temple's current schedule before traveling.

Around Ishiyama-dera

The temple itself deserves the better part of a day. Ishiyama-dera was founded in 747 by the monk Roben at the wish of Emperor Shomu, and it takes its name from the great outcrop of wollastonite, a pale crystalline rock, that rises through the grounds and is itself a designated natural monument. Two of its buildings are National Treasures: the main hall, which shelters a secret image of Nyoirin Kannon opened to the public only once every thirty-three years, and the tahoto pagoda of 1194, reputed to be the oldest two-storied pagoda of its kind in Japan and said to have been donated by the warrior Minamoto no Yoritomo.

The temple holds a particular place in Japanese literature. Murasaki Shikibu, author of The Tale of Genji, is said to have conceived the novel during a retreat here, and a small room in the main hall is pointed out as the spot. The Hojoden treasure hall builds its spring and autumn shows around this connection.

Getting there is straightforward. From JR Ishiyama Station a Kojak bus reaches the Ishiyamadera Sanmon-mae stop in about ten minutes; from Ishiyamadera Station on the Keihan Ishiyama-Sakamoto Line it is a ten-minute walk. Kyoto Station lies roughly half an hour away by train. Nearby stands the Seta no Karahashi, an old bridge over the Seta River celebrated for centuries in poetry and painting, an easy addition to a day spent along the water at the southern tip of Lake Biwa.