The Remaining Volume of the Sutra of the Wise and the

A Nara-Period Sutra Written in Giant Characters

The Tokyo National Museum holds a handscroll of the Kengukyō, the Sutra of the Wise and the Foolish, copied in black ink on pale paper during the eighth century. The scroll preserves 262 vertical lines of text, each character drawn far larger than those of an ordinary copied sutra. For well over a thousand years this style of writing has carried the nickname Daishōmu, and the scroll counts among the small group of National Treasures designated under that name.

A handscroll, or kansu, was the standard book form in early Japan: sheets of paper pasted end to end, rolled around a wooden rod, and read by unrolling a column-width at a time. This one joins 246 lines that run from the opening of the eighth chapter, which concerns a daughter of King Prasenajit, through part of the eleventh, the Chapter of the Heavenly Treasure, with a further 16 lines from the close of a separate chapter pasted on at the end. The arithmetic of those two segments produces the 262 lines recorded in the formal designation.

Why the Scroll Became a National Treasure

The work entered the register of National Treasures on 19 February 1957. Its importance rests in part on rarity. The complete Kengukyō once existed as a set of sixteen or seventeen scrolls kept at the Kaidan-in, the ordination hall of Tōdai-ji in Nara. From the medieval period onward, collectors prized the calligraphy so highly that most of the set was cut apart, a few lines at a time, to be mounted in albums. Only a handful of portions survive as continuous scrolls today, and all of them carry National Treasure status: one at Tōdai-ji, three owned by the Maeda Ikutokukai foundation, two at the Hakutsuru Museum in Hyōgo, and this single scroll in Tokyo.

The name Daishōmu joins the character for "great" with the name of Emperor Shōmu, the eighth-century ruler who ordered the casting of the colossal bronze Buddha at Tōdai-ji. By tradition the bold script was held to be his own brushwork, an idea already set down in court diaries and scroll colophons by the early sixteenth century. Modern specialists set the attribution aside. The writing here resembles nothing in the Zasshū, a manuscript preserved in the Shōsōin repository that is accepted as Shōmu's genuine hand. The copyist was far more likely an anonymous master of the imperial scriptorium, where teams of trained scribes produced sutras as acts of religious merit.

What sets the script apart is its scale. A standard Nara sutra fits seventeen characters into each ruled column; the Daishōmu uses only about twelve, sometimes as few as eleven or as many as thirteen. The thick, deliberate strokes are thought to have been laid down twice over to build their weight. The effect is calligraphy made to hold a wall rather than rest on a reading desk.

The Paper, the Brushwork, and Seeing It in Person

Bring your eye close to the surface and a faint granular texture rises through the ink. The sheet is a celebrated material called dabishi. An old account holds that cremation ash was kneaded into the pulp, which is where the funerary name began. Analysis points to a quieter origin: the paper was made from the bast fiber of the spindle tree, mayumi, the same stock that Nara scriptorium records list under the names mayumi-gami and danshi. Each sheet measures roughly 27.5 centimeters tall and 58 wide, ruled into faint ink columns about 2.6 centimeters across.

Because ink on paper grows faint under prolonged light, the museum displays the scroll only on occasion, roughly once every few years, usually in the National Treasure Gallery on the upper floor of the Honkan, the main gallery of Japanese art. Of the four Daishōmu scrolls held as National Treasures, this is the one that appears most often. When it is unrolled in the case, the centuries-old habit of cutting the manuscript into fragments suddenly makes sense. A visitor is looking at the kind of writing that collectors thought worthy of opening their finest tekagami, the calligraphy albums whose first leaf was reserved for the most prestigious hand the owner could secure.

If the scroll happens to be resting when you visit, the museum's online collection carries high-resolution images, and the calligraphy rooms of the Honkan rotate other early Buddhist manuscripts that reward the trip on their own.

Around the Museum

The Tokyo National Museum stands at the northern edge of Ueno Park in Taitō Ward, about a ten-minute walk from the Park exit of Ueno Station. The park gathers an unusual concentration of cultural institutions within a few minutes of one another: the National Museum of Western Art, with Rodin bronzes in its forecourt; the National Museum of Nature and Science; the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum; and Ueno Zoo. Shinobazu Pond, thick with lotus in summer, lies at the park's southern end.

For food and small purchases, the Ameyoko market runs along the railway between Ueno and Okachimachi stations, a crowded lane of stalls selling dried fish, sweets, and discounted goods. The museum's own grounds include a garden, opened by season, with several relocated teahouses set among the trees behind the main hall.