Bodhisattva Store Sutra〈First Remaining Volume〉

A Sutra Scroll Dated to the Year 457

One short fragment of paper, written in ink with a brush more than fifteen centuries ago, carries a line of text that pins it to an exact moment. The colophon records that the scroll was dedicated in the fifteenth year of the Chengping era, which corresponds to 457, by a ruler who styled himself King of the Great Liang. That king was Juqu Anzhou (Sokyo Anshu in Japanese readings), the last of a dynasty that had been pushed off the Hexi Corridor and had regrouped around the oasis of Gaochang, near present-day Turfan in northwest China.

The object itself is modest: a single surviving scroll, classed in the national registry under calligraphy and classical texts, holding part of the first roll of the Bodhisattva-pitaka Sutra (Bosatsu Zokyo). The Taito City Calligraphy Museum in Tokyo, which owns it, also keeps a second piece from the same text. Together they are among the oldest dated Buddhist manuscripts in any Japanese collection.

The national database files the period as Northern Wei, the dynasty that controlled most of north China at the time. The scroll's own inscription, by contrast, ties it to the Northern Liang court at Gaochang. Both statements are correct, and the gap between them is part of what makes the fragment interesting: it was copied at a Buddhist frontier kingdom that survived as a cultural island after the larger state behind it had fallen.

Why an Ink Fragment Became an Important Cultural Property

It was designated an Important Cultural Property on 3 May 1940. The value lies less in the text, which survives in many later copies, than in the hand that wrote it. Fifth-century scribes worked in a script caught midway between the older clerical style (reisho) and the squared standard style (kaisho) that would later dominate. Sutra-copying of this period preserves that transition in motion, with the flattened, wavelike strokes of clerical writing still visible in characters that are otherwise tightening into the forms a modern reader recognizes.

Few documents fix that change to a year. This one does, through its colophon. For scholars of East Asian calligraphy it serves as a dated yardstick against which undated manuscripts can be measured, and as direct evidence of how Buddhist scriptures were produced and offered as religious merit on the Silk Road's eastern reaches.

The patron matters too. Juqu Anzhou is recorded sponsoring temples and sacred texts at Gaochang, and a small group of manuscripts and stone inscriptions bearing his name has long drawn the attention of historians of Central Asian Buddhism. To hold a scroll he commissioned is to hold a thread connecting a Tokyo museum to a vanished kingdom in the Turfan depression.

The Collector and What to Look For

The fragment did not reach Negishi by chance. The Calligraphy Museum was built by Nakamura Fusetsu (1866-1943), a Western-style painter trained in Paris at the Academie Julian, and the illustrator of Natsume Soseki's novel I Am a Cat. Fusetsu first travelled to China in 1895 as a war correspondent alongside the poet Masaoka Shiki, and the trip turned him into a lifelong collector of Chinese epigraphy and calligraphy. He paid for both the collection and the museum building entirely out of the fees from his own paintings and inscriptions.

He opened the museum in 1936. After his death it stayed in family hands until 1995, when it was given to Taito Ward; it reopened as a public museum in 2000. The holdings run to roughly sixteen thousand pieces, including eleven groups designated Important Cultural Properties and five Important Art Objects: oracle bones, bronzes, stone classics, tomb epitaphs, and manuscripts among them.

Because the scrolls are fragile, the Bodhisattva-pitaka fragment is not on permanent view; paper works rotate through the special exhibitions held in the Nakamura Fusetsu Memorial Hall. A visitor planning to see it should check the current exhibition schedule first. When it is shown, the thing worth slowing down for is the brushwork itself, and the single line of dedication at the end that turns an anonymous sheet of scripture into a document with a date and a name attached.

Around the Museum

The museum sits in Negishi, a quiet residential pocket of Taito Ward about five minutes on foot from the north exit of Uguisudani Station on the JR Yamanote Line. The neighbourhood kept its low-rise character through the twentieth century and still has the feel of old Shitamachi Tokyo. The main building displays Fusetsu's epigraphy collection, while the memorial hall holds the rotating exhibitions and a room devoted to his own work.

Ueno Park, with the Tokyo National Museum and several major art galleries, is a short walk or one stop south. The two institutions often coordinate their exhibitions, so a single afternoon can take in both the calligraphy museum and a wider survey of East Asian art nearby.