Yugashi Jiron (Volume 78)

A Twelve-Metre Scroll from a Monk's Unfinished Vow

Unrolled to its full length, this manuscript runs more than twelve metres across twenty-four sheets of joined paper, each column of characters set inside faint ink ruling. The text is volume seventy-eight of the Yogācārabhūmi-śāstra (Japanese: Yugashijiron), a vast Buddhist treatise on the stages of meditative practice. The copy was finished in 767, during Japan's Nara period, and it carries on its back the black square seal reading "Hōryū-ji Issaikyō," the mark of the great temple's scriptural collection. Today the single scroll is held privately in Tokyo.

The treatise itself is one of the foundational works of the school of Buddhism known in Japan as Hossō, the Japanese form of the Indian Yogācāra, or "Consciousness-Only," tradition. Running to a hundred volumes in its Chinese translation and composed in India around the fourth century, the Yogācārabhūmi was the very text the pilgrim-monk Xuanzang crossed Central Asia to obtain. For a Nara-period copyist to take on volume seventy-eight was to engage with some of the most demanding doctrine then studied in Japan.

The Vow Behind the Scroll

This scroll belongs to a body of sutras known as the Gyōshin votive copies, named for the monk who set the project in motion. Gyōshin trained in Hossō doctrine at Gangō-ji in Nara, donated a manuscript said to be Prince Shōtoku's own commentary on the Lotus Sutra to Hōryū-ji in 737, and led the rebuilding of that temple's eastern precinct, the compound around the octagonal Hall of Dreams. He rose to the senior clerical rank of dai-sōzu.

Gyōshin's vow was an act of merit on a national scale. To repay what Buddhist teaching calls the four debts of gratitude, and to pray for the salvation of all living beings, he undertook the copying of a set of major scriptures traditionally described as three sutras and one treatise: the Great Perfection of Wisdom Sutra, the Lotus Sutra, the Flower Garland Sutra, and the Yogācārabhūmi. The whole came to roughly 2,700 scrolls.

He did not live to see it done. Gyōshin died before the copying was complete, and his disciples, recorded as led by the monk Kōnin (孝仁), carried the work to its end. A colophon dates that completion to the fifth day of the ninth month of the first year of the Jingo-keiun era, which corresponds to 767. The surviving scrolls passed down at Hōryū-ji alongside the temple's larger sutra holdings, and the collection acquired the affectionate nickname "worm-eaten sutras" from the many small insect holes in its paper.

What Marks It as Important

Japan designated this scroll an Important Cultural Property on 30 April 1935, under designation number 170. The value rests on several points at once. As a dated manuscript, it fixes a precise moment, 767, in the history of Japanese sutra copying, a craft that the Nara court had organised into something close to a state workshop. The brushwork follows the disciplined clerical-script convention of Tenpyō-era copying, where evenness and legibility mattered as much as beauty, and the columns are kept straight by ruled ink guidelines rather than left to the hand alone.

The scroll also documents a real human story rather than an anonymous production line. A vow begun by one monk, left unfinished at his death, and completed by his pupils is rare to trace so clearly through a surviving object and its colophon. That the treatise chosen was the Yogācārabhūmi, the central text of Gyōshin's own Hossō school, ties the manuscript directly to the man who commissioned it.

Two black square seals reading "Hōryū-ji Issaikyō" appear below the closing title and again at a paper join on the reverse. They record the scroll's long custody within the Hōryū-ji canon, the route by which a Nara-period copy survived more than twelve centuries.

What to Look For

Sutra scrolls reward slow looking. The head title and the closing title both read "Yogācārabhūmi, volume seventy-eight," bracketing the text and confirming exactly where this scroll sits within the hundred-volume whole. Between them, the ruled lines, called bokkai, run faintly down the paper. They were drawn first, in ink, to keep the seventeen characters of each column aligned across the full twelve metres.

The insect damage that gave the Gyōshin copies their nickname is itself a record of time. So is the paper, joined sheet to sheet, each junction a place where the copyists worked and where, on the back, the temple later pressed its seal. For a reader who knows that Gyōshin rebuilt the Hall of Dreams and that his lacquer portrait statue still sits inside it, the scroll becomes one half of a pair: the building he raised, and the scriptures he vowed to copy.

Where to See Related Works

This particular scroll is in private hands and is not on public display, so a visit to see it is not possible. The fuller story, though, is anchored at Hōryū-ji in Nara Prefecture, where Gyōshin's vow began and where most of his votive sutras were preserved. The eastern precinct he rebuilt centres on the Hall of Dreams, and the dry-lacquer seated portrait of Gyōshin himself survives there, a Nara-period work of considerable presence.

Nara-period sutra copies of this kind appear from time to time in the rotating displays of major museums, including the Tokyo National Museum and the Nara National Museum, the latter especially during its autumn exhibitions of temple treasures. Checking a museum's current exhibition schedule before travelling is the surest way to find an example of eighth-century Japanese sutra calligraphy on view.