Tripitaka in Ink on Paper

The Manuscript Buddhist Canon of Onjō-ji

At the close of each of the 592 folded volumes still held at Onjō-ji, a short prayer appears, printed from carved woodblocks. The wording repeats from book to book, with one consistent exception: a single name brushed into the page by a living hand, Takauji. The signer was Ashikaga Takauji (1305–1358), the warrior who founded the Ashikaga shogunate, and these volumes are what survives of an entire Buddhist canon he had copied out in the year 1354.

The Japanese name, Shihon Bokusho Daizōkyō, describes the object plainly: ink writing on paper, forming a daizōkyō, the complete corpus of Buddhist scripture. A canon of this kind runs to thousands of separate texts, and copying one by hand was the work of many people over many months. The set carries the date Bunna 3 (1354), placing it in the Nanbokuchō period, the decades when two rival imperial courts claimed legitimacy at once. The era name itself is a clue to the politics behind the books. Bunna was the reign name used by the Northern Court, which Takauji supported; the Southern Court, founded by the emperor Takauji had driven from Kyoto, counted the same year under a different name.

A Shogun's Prayer for the Dead

The reason a military ruler commissioned a Buddhist canon lies in the prayer printed at the end of every volume. By the votive text, Takauji dedicated the work to the repose of Emperor Go-Daigo, of his own parents, and of all who had fallen in the wars since the Genkō disturbance of the early 1330s, friend and foe alike. Go-Daigo was the very sovereign Takauji had risen against and forced into exile, where he died in 1339. Fifteen years later, the man who had broken him paid for thousands of scriptures partly to settle his spirit, together with the countless others killed on both sides.

By the account kept at the temple, the undertaking was also timed to the thirteenth memorial of Takauji's mother, with the canon to be finished on the anniversary of her death. Monks from leading temples in Kyoto, Nara, and Kamakura were gathered to do the transcribing, and the whole canon, more than five thousand volumes, was reportedly produced in about a year. The dedication ceremony was held on the twenty-third day of the twelfth month of 1354 at Tōji-in, the Ashikaga family's mortuary temple in Kyoto. Takauji is said to have brushed ten volumes of the Great Perfection of Wisdom Sutra in his own hand.

Accounts differ on how the canon reached Onjō-ji. Some record that it was moved here at the request of the temple's monks; the temple's own history says it first entered the Ashikaga mortuary temple and was transferred to Onjō-ji afterward. Of the original five thousand and more volumes, only 592 remain at the temple today. The rest scattered over the centuries into other collections, among them sets at the Nezu Museum and the Tokyo, Kyoto, Nara, and Kyushu national museums. The portion held at Onjō-ji was designated an Important Cultural Property on January 30, 1934. That ranking sits one step below National Treasure in Japan's heritage system; it marks an object of high national value that has not been singled out for the very highest tier.

What to Look For

Each volume is bound as an orihon, a single long sheet folded back and forth like an accordion and wrapped in a stiff cover. The form was made for a ritual called tendoku, a kind of turning-reading in which a celebrant recites only the title, the translator's name, and a few lines from the opening, middle, and end of a text rather than the whole of it. Because the spine is left unglued, lifting the cover sets the continuous paper fluttering in a way that earned the binding its other name, the whirlwind binding.

The printed prayer at each volume's end comes in slightly different settings, some of four lines and some of five, and only the signature reading Takauji is in the patron's own ink. Seeing the same name recur in the same hand across hundreds of volumes gives a sense of the scale of the vow behind them.

One practical point shapes any visit. The manuscript canon is a fragile set and is not part of the regular temple route; by some accounts it is held on deposit at the Nara National Museum. Related volumes from other collections do surface in special museum exhibitions now and then, so the canon is more often met in a glass case at a national museum than at the temple that owns it.

Around Onjō-ji

Onjō-ji, widely known as Mii-dera, is the head temple of the Tendai Jimon school and spreads across the lower slopes of Mount Nagara above the southern shore of Lake Biwa in Ōtsu. The temple has been destroyed and rebuilt so many times across its long history that it is sometimes called the phoenix temple. Its Main Hall, a National Treasure, anchors a precinct dense with designated buildings and images.

Close to the Main Hall stands the sutra repository, the Issaikyō-zō, itself an Important Cultural Property. This Zen-style hall was moved to Onjō-ji in 1602 by the warlord Mōri Terumoto and holds a huge rotating octagonal bookcase. The canon stored in that revolving case is a printed Goryeo edition from Korea, a separate work from Takauji's handwritten one, but the building offers a vivid picture of how a temple kept and turned its scriptures. Nearby hangs the Evening Bell of Mii, counted among the Eight Views of Ōmi and among the three most celebrated bells in Japan.

The temple sits a short walk from Mii-dera Station on the Keihan line and is open daily from 9:00 to 16:30, with last entry at 16:00. A full circuit of the grounds takes about an hour. Lake Biwa and central Ōtsu lie within easy reach, and Kyoto is roughly fifteen minutes away by train, which makes the temple an easy half-day from the city.