A Collection of Travelogues Written in Ink on Paper

Gyōrekishō at Ishiyama-dera: A Monk's Record of Tang China

In 853, a monk named Enchin left Japan aboard a Silla merchant's ship, was driven off course by a storm, and came ashore far to the south of where he had intended, on the coast of Fuzhou. He would spend the next five years travelling through Tang China. The record of that journey survives at Ishiyama-dera, in the city of Otsu, as a single ink-on-paper handscroll: the Gyorekisho, an abridged account of his travels.

The scroll is short, plain, and easy to overlook beside the temple's famous halls. Yet it preserves one of the few firsthand Japanese descriptions of ninth-century China, written by a man who walked its roads, argued with its monks, and carried home more than a thousand volumes of Buddhist scripture.

What the Scroll Records

The full title is Shihon bokusho Gyorekisho (Enchin ki), which describes the object precisely: ink writing on paper, the "Abstract of Travels," set down as Enchin's account. The text is an abridgement of a longer travel diary Enchin compiled after his return. That original work, sometimes called the Zaito junreiki or Gyorekiki, is generally thought to no longer survive in its complete form, which makes the surviving abstract the main route by which his account reaches us.

One point is worth keeping straight for any visitor. The scroll at Ishiyama-dera is not Enchin's own brush. It is a copy made in the Kamakura period, several centuries after his death, by scribes working from an earlier manuscript. Copies like this were how monastic libraries kept important texts alive, and the temple's repository protected this one through the long stretch of medieval Japan.

What the text contains is travel, the practical kind. Enchin notes where he landed, which temples received him, who taught him, and where the road turned difficult. He records his time at Guoqing-ji on Mount Tiantai, the cradle of the Tendai teachings, and his stay in the Tang capital of Chang'an. He also writes, at unusual length, about his bitter falling-out with a fellow Japanese monk named Ensai, a quarrel that turns the document from a dry itinerary into something closer to a personal memoir.

The Traveller Behind the Text

Enchin lived from 814 to 891 and is known by his posthumous title, Chisho Daishi. He was born in Sanuki, in what is now Kagawa Prefecture, and tradition holds that his mother was a niece of Kukai, the founder of Japanese Shingon Buddhism. He trained on Mount Hiei under the master Gishin and spent years in mountain seclusion before setting out for China.

The journey itself reads like an adventure. After the storm that pushed his ship toward Fuzhou, he made his way to Mount Tiantai and studied Tendai doctrine under the teacher Wuwai. In 855 he reached Chang'an, then among the largest cities on earth, and at the Qinglong-ji temple received esoteric initiation from the master Faquan, who entrusted him with a secret text on the five-part contemplation. He returned to Japan in 858 carrying, by tradition, 441 sets of scriptures, more than a thousand volumes in all.

Back home, Enchin reorganised Onjo-ji, the temple better known as Mii-dera, as the center of his own line of teaching and later became the fifth head of the Tendai school. After his death his followers and those of the earlier traveller-monk Ennin drifted apart, and Tendai split into two branches: the Mountain Gate at Enryaku-ji and the Temple Gate at Onjo-ji, which still trace their roots to him.

Why It Was Designated

The scroll was registered as an Important Cultural Property on 15 April 1903, among the earliest waves of national designations in modern Japan. Its value lies less in its appearance than in what it carries. As a witness to Enchin's pilgrimage, it belongs to a small group of texts that document the religious traffic between Japan and Tang China at first hand.

Three such accounts are usually read together. Ennin's Nitto guho junrei koki came first and is the fullest. Enchin's Gyorekisho followed. A century later the monk Jojin wrote his San Tendai Godaisan ki. Read in sequence, they map how Japanese Buddhism kept reaching back to its Chinese sources across the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries. Enchin's record is the candid one, willing to name a rival monk and describe a dispute that other writers might have left out.

A clarification helps here, because the names overlap. A separate and far larger body of Enchin material, the documents and texts held at Onjo-ji and the Tokyo National Museum, was inscribed on the UNESCO Memory of the World register in 2023. The Ishiyama-dera scroll is not part of that group. It is its own object, a medieval copy preserved in a different temple's library, valued for the account it transmits rather than for an imperial autograph or an original Tang permit.

Seeing It, and Seeing Ishiyama-dera

Set expectations first. Like most of the calligraphy and texts in Ishiyama-dera's repository, the Gyorekisho is almost never put on public view. Old paper is fragile, and documents of this kind are shown only on rare occasions, usually in a special exhibition rather than as part of the standard temple visit. A traveller should not arrive expecting to find it in a display case.

That is no reason to skip the temple, which ranks among the most rewarding in the Kyoto and Otsu region. Ishiyama-dera was founded in 747 by the monk Roben and is built directly on a great mass of wollastonite, the pale crystalline rock that gives the temple its name, "Stone Mountain Temple," and that is itself a designated Natural Monument. The main hall, a National Treasure, stands on a stage-like platform anchored to the rock. Above it rises the tahoto, a two-storey pagoda also designated a National Treasure and said to have been donated by Minamoto no Yoritomo in 1194, often called the oldest dated pagoda of its type in Japan.

The temple is also where, by tradition, Murasaki Shikibu began writing The Tale of Genji while on retreat, gazing at the harvest moon over the Seta River. The "Genji Room" marks the spot. For the documents themselves, the place to watch is the Bujoden treasure hall at the top of the grounds, which mounts seasonal exhibitions in spring and autumn drawing on the temple's collection. Checking its current schedule before a visit is the surest way to time things well.

Around the Temple

Ishiyama-dera sits on the west bank of the Seta River, the single outlet that drains Lake Biwa toward the sea. A short walk away stands the Seta no Karahashi, an old bridge counted among Japan's three most famous and long celebrated as one of the Eight Views of Omi. The approach to the temple is lined with shops selling local specialities, including dishes built around the small shijimi clams of the lake and the temple's own ishimochi rice sweets.

Reaching the temple is easy. From Kyoto Station it is roughly thirty minutes by train, changing to the Keihan line or taking a bus from JR Ishiyama Station, with the Keihan Ishiyama-dera Station about a ten-minute walk from the gate. The grounds reward an unhurried pace, climbing through maples and seasonal flowers to the viewpoints near the pagoda and the Tsukimi-tei pavilion above the river.