The Spring and Autumn Classics: the Remaining Volume 26

An Ancient Chinese Classic, Copied by Hand in Heian Japan

Among the old books kept at Ishiyama-dera, a temple on the wooded slopes above the Seta River in Shiga Prefecture, is a single paper scroll carrying the twenty-sixth volume of the Shunjū Keiden Shūkai (in Chinese, Chunqiu Jingzhuan Jijie). The text is incomplete, which is why its formal name ends with the word zankan, a surviving fragment. What remains was brushed in Japan during the Heian period (794–1185), making it one of the oldest hand-copied witnesses to a work that scholars across East Asia had studied for centuries.

The parent work reaches back to one of the foundational Confucian classics. The Spring and Autumn Annals is a terse year-by-year chronicle of the ancient state of Lu, traditionally linked to the editorial hand of Confucius. Its bare entries were expanded by a famous narrative commentary, the Zuo Commentary (Zuo zhuan), and in the third century a Western Jin scholar and official named Du Yu (222–285) wove the classic and the commentary into a single text, adding his own collected notes. The result became the authoritative form in which the work was read across Tang China, and in Japan it was studied from the Nara period onward.

One detail sets this scroll apart from an ordinary copy. The reverse side carries a separate text, a version of the Buddhist precepts known as the Shibun kaihon, the abbreviated rules of the Dharmaguptaka school. Paper was costly, and a sheet that had served one purpose was often turned over and used again. A document like this therefore preserves two works at once.

Why the Scroll Was Named a National Treasure

Japan recognized the manuscript as a National Treasure on November 14, 1953. The reasoning rests on a plain fact of textual history: handwritten copies made before the spread of printing can preserve readings that later printed editions altered or lost. A Heian-period copy of Du Yu's work, brushed many centuries before the woodblock editions that circulated later, gives specialists a window onto how the classic was actually read and understood in early Japan.

Such copies often carry more than the base text. Small marks added between and beside the columns, used to guide a reader through classical Chinese in Japanese word order, show how the work was taught in the scholarly households that specialized in the Confucian curriculum at the court academy. Each annotated copy is, in effect, a record of one school's understanding.

The precepts text on the back adds a second layer of value. It is itself an early Buddhist manuscript, and the way the two works share a single sheet tells researchers something about how paper moved through a temple's hands. Ishiyama-dera holds an unusual number of these early books, among them celebrated fragments of the Records of the Grand Historian and the Chinese dictionary Yupian. The temple escaped the fires that destroyed so many collections elsewhere, and its storehouse became one of the richest survivals of its kind in the country.

Seeing the Manuscript, and the Temple That Keeps It

A frank word for visitors: the scroll is not on permanent display, and books of this kind are shown only rarely. Ishiyama-dera's treasure hall, the Hōjōden, opens for two seasons each year, in spring and autumn, with exhibitions built mainly around Murasaki Shikibu and the Tale of Genji. The contents rotate, so the chance of meeting this particular scroll on any given visit is slim. Anyone hoping to see it should treat a viewing as a fortunate coincidence rather than a fixed attraction, and check what is on show before traveling.

That is no reason to stay away. The temple itself is why most people come, and it rewards a slow walk. Ishiyama-dera takes its name, "stone mountain," from the great mass of pale wollastonite that breaks out of the hillside near the main hall. The hall is built out over the rock on a timber platform, a method also seen at Kiyomizu-dera in Kyoto, and from its veranda the view runs down toward Lake Biwa and the Seta River.

The literary association runs deep here. By tradition Murasaki Shikibu began writing the Tale of Genji while secluded at the temple in the early eleventh century, gazing at the autumn moon over the lake. True or not, the tale has drawn readers and writers to these grounds for a thousand years, and it sits easily alongside the temple's long habit of guarding old books, the manuscript among them.

Around Ishiyama-dera

The temple lies in the southern part of Ōtsu, where Lake Biwa narrows into the Seta River, about ten minutes by bus from JR Ishiyama Station. The Keihan line stops even closer, a short walk from the gate. The grounds are large and built on a slope, with stone steps and rising paths, so sturdy shoes help; most visitors spend somewhere between one and two hours.

The wider area repays a longer stay. The shore of Lake Biwa, the old town of Ōtsu, and the temples and shrines around the lake's southern end are all within easy reach, and Kyoto lies only a short train ride to the west. Spring brings plum and cherry blossom to the temple's slopes, and autumn the maples for which the grounds are also known.