The Lotus Sutra (Kunoji Sutra)

A Sutra Written by Thirty Hands

In 1141, a circle of aristocrats at the very top of Japan's imperial court divided a single Buddhist scripture among themselves. Each person took responsibility for one scroll: dyeing the paper, scattering it with cut gold and silver foil, and copying out one chapter of the Lotus Sutra in careful brushwork. The names recorded at the end of each scroll read like a roster of twelfth-century power: Retired Emperor Toba, his empress Taikenmon-in, the imperial consort Bifukumon-in, and the ladies-in-waiting who served them.

Nineteen of those scrolls survive today as a single National Treasure, designated on November 22, 1952. They belong to Tesshuji, a temple in the Shimizu ward of Shizuoka City, and are known collectively as the Kunoji-kyo, after Kunoji, the mountain temple where they spent most of their eight centuries. Together with the Heike Nokyo of Itsukushima Shrine, they rank among the supreme examples of Heian-period decorated sutras. The Kunoji-kyo is the older of the two by more than twenty years.

What the Kunoji-kyo Is

The Lotus Sutra, the central scripture of much of East Asian Buddhism, consists of eight scrolls containing twenty-eight chapters. In the late Heian period a devotional practice emerged in which the text was recopied chapter by chapter, one chapter per scroll, with an opening sutra (the Muryogi-kyo) and a closing sutra (the Kanfugen-kyo) added to make a set of thirty. Each scroll was assigned to a different sponsor, who earned religious merit through the act of commissioning or writing it. This format is called a kechien ippon-gyo, a "chapter-a-scroll sutra for forming a karmic bond," and the Kunoji-kyo is the oldest surviving example of the genre.

The scrolls are anything but plain copies. Their papers are dyed in varied tones, then dressed with kirihaku (small squares of cut gold and silver leaf), sunago (metallic dust), and noge (fine slivers of foil). The ruled guidelines that keep the calligraphy straight, called kaisen, are drawn in gold or silver pigment rather than ink. Several scrolls open with frontispiece paintings in the yamato-e style, and some of these weave hidden characters into the imagery, a playful device known as ashide. One scroll now in the Tokyo National Museum collection, the Anrakugyo chapter, carries lotus and arabesque motifs in gold and silver pigment along its upper and lower margins.

Look closely at any reproduction and the individuality becomes obvious. Because thirty different patrons prepared thirty different scrolls, no two share quite the same paper color, decoration scheme, or hand. That variety, scroll by scroll, is one of the qualities scholars value most in the set.

Why It Became a National Treasure

Three things set the Kunoji-kyo apart. First is its date. The colophons and surviving records connect the project to the milieu of Retired Emperor Toba around 1141, the year his empress Taikenmon-in (Fujiwara no Shoshi) took Buddhist vows. The prevailing view links the copying to her tonsure, though some accounts associate it with the retired emperor's own entry into religious life around the same time. Either way, the set predates the celebrated Heike Nokyo, which was vowed in 1164 and dedicated in 1167. As the earliest substantially preserved kechien ippon-gyo, the Kunoji-kyo marks the starting point for studying how this devotional art form developed.

Second is the directness of its connection to named individuals. The signature at the end of each scroll identifies who stood behind it, turning the set into a document of court society on the eve of the Genpei wars, an age when aristocrats, sensing the world slipping toward the degenerate age of Buddhist prophecy, poured their wealth into acts of devotion.

Third is sheer survival. Of the original thirty scrolls, twenty-six are accounted for today. The nineteen at Tesshuji form the National Treasure; four scrolls in a private collection are likewise designated a National Treasure; three at the Tokyo National Museum and two at the Gotoh Museum hold Important Cultural Property status; four remain unlocated. That nineteen scrolls stayed together in one temple's keeping for centuries is remarkable in itself.

From the Capital to Suruga Bay

The scrolls were first kept at Anrakuju-in, Retired Emperor Toba's temple south of the capital. How they then traveled some 300 kilometers east to Kunoji, a temple on the steep coastal mountain of Kunozan in Suruga Province, has never been settled. Theories range from evacuation during the wars that engulfed Kyoto to ties between Kunoji and the retired emperor's devotional circuit, but no document records the move itself.

Kunoji's own story supplies the rest of the journey. Temple tradition holds that it began in the era of Empress Suiko (late sixth to early seventh century), when a local figure named Kuno Tadahito enshrined a Buddhist image on the mountain, and that the Nara-period monk Gyoki later organized it as a full temple. At its medieval height it is said to have housed hundreds of monks' residences. In the late sixteenth century the warlord Takeda Shingen, having seized Suruga, wanted the strategic summit for a fortress, so the entire temple was moved down to its present site at Murakushi in what is now Shimizu (sources place the relocation variously between 1568 and 1575). The summit later became the site of Kunozan Toshogu, the original burial shrine of Tokugawa Ieyasu.

The temple weathered the Edo period under shogunal patronage but collapsed after the Meiji Restoration, standing priestless and derelict. Its rescuer was Yamaoka Tesshu, the swordsman and statesman who had negotiated the peaceful surrender of Edo in 1868. He launched the rebuilding in 1883; after his death the work was carried to completion in 1910 by supporters in Shimizu, and the revived temple took the name Tesshuji in his honor. Through that entire cycle of relocation, ruin, and rebirth, the nineteen scrolls of the Kunoji-kyo remained with the temple.

Seeing the Kunoji-kyo Today

The scrolls no longer reside at the temple. For safekeeping they are deposited at the Tokyo National Museum in Ueno, which displays selections from time to time, most often in the National Treasure Gallery (Room 2) of the Honkan building. Recent showings include runs in early 2025 and in the autumn of 2025, and one or more scrolls also appear occasionally in loan exhibitions at other museums. Checking the museum's exhibition schedule before a visit is essential, since no scroll is on permanent view. High-resolution images of related Kunoji-kyo scrolls can be browsed any time on the e-Museum website run by the National Institutes for Cultural Heritage.

Tesshuji itself rewards a visit for its setting and history rather than for the sutra. The temple stands on a rise at the foot of Mount Udo with views toward Shimizu Port, and its grounds are open to visitors, though as of early 2025 the main hall and treasure house are closed to entry. From JR Shimizu Station, buses on the Konan or Shiritsu Byoin lines reach the Tesshuji stop in about fifteen minutes.

Around the Temple

The Kunoji-kyo's old and new homes can be linked in a single day along Suruga Bay. Miho no Matsubara, the pine grove celebrated in the legend of the celestial feather robe and registered as part of the Mount Fuji World Heritage property, lies a short drive east of Tesshuji. Kunozan Toshogu, the lavishly carved shrine complex occupying the mountain where Kunoji once stood, is reached by ropeway from the Nihondaira plateau or by a 1,159-step stone stairway from the shore. The plateau itself offers one of the classic views of Mount Fuji rising beyond the bay. Back in central Shimizu, the port district and its sushi markets make an easy finish to the route.