Wax-Covered Ink Writing by the Wise and Foolish

Xutang Zhiyu's Calligraphy on Wax-Coated Paper

A Chinese Chan master who never crossed the sea to Japan came to hold a place of unusual honor in the Japanese tea room, and this single scroll is part of the reason. Registered formally as Rōsen bokusho Kidō Chigu bokuseki, the work carries the brushwork of Xutang Zhiyu (1185–1269), known in Japan as Kidō Chigu, written in ink on a sheet of wax-treated paper. It belongs to the Southern Song dynasty of the thirteenth century and survives as one mounted hanging scroll. The piece is held in a private collection in Tokyo.

In Japan, calligraphy by Chinese and Japanese Zen monks is known as bokuseki, literally "ink traces." These sheets were never display pieces in the modern sense. A monk wrote a verse, a letter, or a certificate of enlightenment for a disciple, and the paper was kept afterward as the record of a spiritual bond. Centuries later, tea practitioners began hanging such writings in the alcove of the tea room, where the character of the brush stood in for the presence of the master who once held it.

Xutang was born in Xiangshan, on the coast of present-day Zhejiang. He took the tonsure at sixteen and received Dharma transmission from Yun'an Puyan. He went on to lead several of the greatest monasteries of his age, ending his career as abbot of Jingshan Wanshou, the foremost of the so-called Five Mountains, and both the emperors Lizong and Duzong took him as a teacher. He died in 1269, at eighty-five.

What gave Xutang his standing in Japan came down to a single line of succession. His Japanese disciple Nanpo Jōmyō, later honored as Daiō Kokushi, sailed home carrying his teacher's seal of approval. Nanpo's heir Shūhō Myōchō founded the great Kyoto monastery of Daitokuji. From this pair descends the Ōtōkan line, the only branch of Japanese Rinzai Zen whose transmission has continued unbroken to the present day. The fifteenth-century monk and poet Ikkyū stood seven generations along that same line. For a Japanese practitioner, then, Xutang was no foreign curiosity. He was a founding ancestor.

Why It Was Designated

The scroll was named a National Treasure under the old protection law on May 27, 1939. When Japan reorganized its heritage system with the Law for the Protection of Cultural Properties in 1950, works of that earlier rank were reclassified, and the piece has since carried the status of Important Cultural Property in the category of calligraphy and classical texts.

Among the writings prized for the tea room, those of Xutang stood first. Daitokuji and its sub-temples were bound up with the growth of tea practice from the sixteenth century onward, and the monastery traced its founding line back to him, so his hand was held above that of any other Chan calligrapher. Records of famous tea gatherings from the Muromachi and Momoyama periods cite his scrolls far more often than those of any contemporary. To own a sheet of his writing was to hold a relic of the lineage itself.

What sets this particular work apart is named in its own title. The support is rōsen, paper finished with wax to give a smooth, faintly lustrous surface that resists the spread of ink. Coated and sometimes decorated papers of this kind were a refinement of Chinese craft, and a brush moves across them quite differently than across an absorbent plain sheet. Most surviving examples of Xutang's calligraphy are written on ordinary paper, so the choice of a treated ground here is one of the features the registration singles out.

What to Look For

Start with the brush itself. Xutang's writing carries the imprint of Zhang Jizhi, the leading calligrapher of the late Southern Song, whose angular, deliberate manner shaped a whole generation of monastic hands. In Xutang's surviving sheets, viewers often remark on how a stroke that looks loose or unhurried holds a quiet tension at its core.

The wax-sized paper changes what the eye sees. Because the ink sits more on the surface than it sinks in, the difference between a fully loaded brush and a drying one reads sharply, line by line. Stand before such a sheet and you can follow the order and the speed of the writing almost as a recording of the hand in motion.

Where to See Xutang's Calligraphy Today

This scroll is privately owned and not on permanent public view. The surest way to encounter Xutang's brush is through the related works held by museums and temples in and around Tokyo and Kyoto, most of which appear only during rotating special exhibitions.

• Tokyo National Museum holds the National Treasure known as the "Torn Kidō" (Yabure Kidō), a Dharma-verse written for a Japanese monk, along with several other Xutang sheets shown by rotation.
• Daitokuji in Kyoto owns a National Treasure incense-offering verse by Xutang.
• The Seikadō Bunko Art Museum in Marunouchi, Tokyo, keeps two Important Cultural Property sheets by him.
• The Gotoh Museum in Tokyo holds an Important Cultural Property pair of verses.
• The Tokugawa Art Museum in Nagoya owns a verse he gave to an attendant monk in 1254.

Because access depends on each institution's exhibition calendar, it is worth checking schedules before a visit. A scroll of this kind is light-sensitive and shown only for short periods.