The Spring and Autumn Classics: the Remaining Volume 29

A Confucian Classic with a Buddhist Secret

Most documents preserved as National Treasures show the world a single text. The handscroll known as Shunjū Kyōden Shikkai, Scroll 29, kept at Ishiyama-dera in Shiga Prefecture, shows two. On the front runs a Chinese commentary on one of the Confucian classics, brushed by a Japanese hand during the Heian period. Turn the paper over and a different world appears: columns of esoteric Buddhist ritual, set down later by monks who needed paper and reached for an old scroll that had outlived its first purpose.

That act of reuse is the reason the text survives at all.

The Text and Its Author

The Spring and Autumn Annals (Chunqiu) is one of the Five Classics of the Confucian canon, a spare chronicle of the state of Lu traditionally linked to Confucius. Its terse entries invited centuries of explanation. The most influential reading came from Du Yu (222 to 285), a general and scholar of the Western Jin who joined the Annals to the Zuo Commentary and added his own notes. The edition he produced, the Chunqiu jingzhuan jijie, became the standard text for studying the Annals under the Tang dynasty.

It reached Japan early. From the Nara period onward the work was read at court and at the state academy, where the hereditary families charged with teaching the classics built their scholarship around it. The Ishiyama-dera piece is a Japanese manuscript copy of volume 29, surviving now only as a fragment of what was once a longer scroll.

One of Four, One of Three

Four copies of the Chunqiu jingzhuan jijie hold National Treasure status in Japan. Only one was written in China. The other three, this volume among them, were copied in Japan. The distinction carries weight. Early complete editions of the text vanished long ago in China, so these Japanese manuscripts preserve readings and forms of the work that would otherwise be lost. They also record how Japanese scholars actually read classical Chinese, through the marks and glosses added beside the characters to fix pronunciation and word order.

The Ishiyama-dera fragment was designated a National Treasure on 14 November 1953, under designation number 00179. It is a single handscroll, classed among calligraphy and texts.

The Other Side

The national cultural property database records that the back of the scroll carries Shingon ritual texts. Temple catalogues identify them more exactly as procedures of the Diamond Realm, or Kongōkai, one of the two great schemes that organize esoteric Buddhist practice. The sequence is not hard to picture. A copy of the Confucian commentary, damaged or no longer wanted in its original setting, came into the hands of monks at Ishiyama-dera. Paper was expensive. The blank reverse offered a clean surface, and a monk used it to write out the ritual instructions he was studying.

Ishiyama-dera was exactly the place where this would happen. By the Heian period the temple had moved from Kegon doctrine toward Shingon esoteric Buddhism, and its monks were copying ritual manuals on an enormous scale. The temple still holds collections counted in the thousands: the Ishiyama-dera Issaikyō, a body of more than four thousand scrolls of Buddhist scripture, and the Azekura shōgyō, close to two thousand items recording the procedures of esoteric rites. Seen against that working library, a recycled Confucian scroll with Diamond Realm ritual on its back is less a curiosity than a small window onto how the temple operated.

Visiting Ishiyama-dera

One thing to settle before you go: you are unlikely to see this scroll itself. National Treasure documents are fragile and stay in storage, brought out only for occasional special exhibitions. What you can see is the temple that made and kept it.

Ishiyama-dera stands above the Seta River in Otsu, a short ride from Kyoto, and earns a visit on its own merits. It is the thirteenth station of the Saigoku Kannon pilgrimage and, by tradition, the place where Murasaki Shikibu began writing The Tale of Genji. The temple takes its name, meaning "stone mountain," from the great outcrop of wollastonite that the main hall rises upon, itself a designated Natural Monument. Its treasure hall, the Hōjōden, opens for spring and autumn exhibitions devoted to Murasaki Shikibu and the Genji, when manuscripts and paintings from the collection go on display.

Come in spring for plum and cherry blossom, or in late autumn when the maples turn and the grounds stay open into the evening for illumination. The scholarship that produced the scroll is invisible to a visitor, but the setting that valued enough to preserve it surrounds you on every side.