Remaining Volumes of the Sutra of the Wise and the Foolish

A Nara-Period Sutra Written in Bold, Oversized Characters

Among the calligraphic treasures held by the Maeda Ikutokukai Foundation in Tokyo are three scrolls of the Kengukyō, the Buddhist Sutra of the Wise and the Foolish, transcribed in the eighth century in characters far larger than any ordinary copyist would have used. The Agency for Cultural Affairs designated the set a National Treasure on 28 June 1956. The three scrolls carry 419, 146, and 18 lines of text respectively, the remains of what was once a much longer work.

The sutra is a collection of parables on cause and effect, illustrating through cautionary tales how wise and foolish actions ripen into reward or suffering across lifetimes. It reached East Asia from Central Asia and was rendered into Chinese, where it grew into a set of more than sixty short chapters. Counts of sixty-two and sixty-nine both appear in the scholarly literature, a reflection of how the text was divided and recombined over the centuries.

The popular name for this manuscript is Daishōmu, written with the characters for "Great Shōmu." By tradition the brush belonged to Emperor Shōmu (701–756), the sovereign who built the Great Buddha at Tōdai-ji, and the word "great" sets these bold, large-character copies apart from the medium and small-character versions known as Chūshōmu and Shōshōmu. Most specialists now read the hand as that of a master scribe from the imperial sutra-copying bureau, possibly a calligrapher trained in the Chinese tradition. The attribution to the emperor himself is best treated as an honored tradition rather than fact.

Why It Was Designated a National Treasure

The first thing a viewer notices is the scale of the writing. A standard Nara sutra fit about seventeen characters into each vertical line. Here the scribe set down only twelve or thirteen, each one broad and deliberate, the strokes so thick that some scholars believe the brush was passed over them twice. The style has been compared to the carved dedicatory inscriptions of the Longmen grottoes in China, especially the famous Shipinggong inscription, and it is read as one of the strongest examples of eighth-century Tenpyō brushwork to survive.

The paper is its own story. It is called dabishi, a name that translates as "cremation paper." Tiny dark particles are scattered across its whitish surface, and an old belief held that these were the powdered relics of the Buddha, or of Empress Kōmyō, kneaded into the pulp. Later examination under the microscope suggested something less miraculous but still deliberate: finely crushed fragrant wood, mixed in to repel insects and lend the sheet a quiet solemnity. The base material itself is bast fiber from the spindle tree, coated with white gofun pigment, a paper the Nara workshops recorded under the name mayumigami.

Rarity completes the case. The original may have run to sixteen or seventeen scrolls, kept at the ordination hall of Tōdai-ji. From at least the late Muromachi period the set was dispersed and cut apart, because connoisseurs prized a few lines of Daishōmu above almost any other old hand and conventionally pasted such pieces at the very front of their calligraphy albums. That very prestige doomed the scrolls to the knife. Complete roll-format sections now survive at only four institutions, each holding a National Treasure: Tōdai-ji in Nara, the Maeda Ikutokukai Foundation, the Hakutsuru Museum of Art near Kobe, and the Tokyo National Museum.

What to Look For

None of the three Maeda scrolls is an original continuous roll. Each was reassembled from surviving sheets, which is why the paper count and line count vary so widely between them: the first scroll gathers 419 lines across twenty sheets, the second 146 lines across nine, and the third just 18 lines on a single sheet. Knowing this, a careful viewer can sometimes spot where one sheet was joined to the next.

Up close, the particles in the paper become visible, and the ruled column lines that guided the scribe frame each character like a panel. The contrast is striking: dense black ink, broad as a banner, against a pale ground flecked with fragrant wood.

There is also the simple value of seeing the writing in scroll form at all. The world is full of Daishōmu fragments of three or four lines, mounted in albums and passed from one collection to the next. To stand before a roll carrying hundreds of continuous lines is to read the sutra closer to the way its eighth-century maker intended.

Seeing the Scrolls and Nearby Options

The Maeda Ikutokukai Foundation, in the Setagaya district of Tokyo, preserves the heirlooms of the Kaga Maeda clan but keeps no exhibition hall of its own. Its treasures travel, and the most reliable place to encounter them is the Ishikawa Prefectural Museum of Art in Kanazawa, the old seat of the Maeda domain, where the foundation's holdings appear in special exhibitions every few years.

If your aim is simply to see Daishōmu calligraphy, the Tokyo National Museum rotates its own National Treasure scroll into the galleries from time to time, and the Hakutsuru Museum of Art near Kobe holds two more scrolls. Small fragments of the same manuscript turn up in the calligraphy albums of museums across Japan, including the Kyoto National Museum. Because these are light-sensitive paper works, none is on permanent view; checking the current exhibition schedule before traveling will save a wasted trip.