Bunkan Kaori Hayashi Zanmaki

The Wenguan Cilin: A Tang Anthology That Outlived Its Own Country

In 658, the scholar-official Xu Jingzong presented Emperor Gaozong of Tang with a literary anthology that ran to a thousand scrolls. It gathered poetry and prose from the Han dynasty down to the early Tang, sorted by genre, and stood as the second oldest general anthology of Chinese literature after the famous Wen Xuan. That work was the Wenguan Cilin, read in Japanese as Bunkan Shirin.

In China it barely survived its own dynasty. By the Song period, only a handful of scrolls were still recorded, and even those soon vanished. The book lived on in one place only: Japan, where copies brought over centuries earlier were recopied and kept. Twelve of those surviving scrolls belong today to Shōchi-in, a sub-temple on Mount Kōya in Wakayama Prefecture. They were designated a National Treasure on 14 November 1953.

A text that disappears in its homeland but endures abroad has a name in Japanese scholarship: an itsuzonsho, a "lost-but-preserved book." The Wenguan Cilin is one of the most important examples of the type.

From Chang'an to a Mountain Temple

The anthology travelled to Japan during the centuries when envoys and monks were carrying Chinese books eastward in large numbers. The scrolls held at Shōchi-in center on a manuscript copied in Kōnin 14, the year 823, placing the act of transcription squarely in the early Heian period. By the time Mount Kōya itself was barely a generation old as a monastic centre, these texts were already being preserved as objects of study.

For a long stretch afterward the work was forgotten on the continent. Its return to Chinese attention happened by an unusual route. In the early nineteenth century the scholar Hayashi Jussai included four surviving scrolls in his collection Itsuzon Sōsho, and when that compilation reached China, readers there encountered the Wenguan Cilin again for the first time in centuries. Later the Qing scholar Yang Shoujing, working in Japan, tracked down fourteen further scrolls not in Hayashi's set and printed them in his Guyi Congshu. Through these efforts a Chinese imperial anthology was effectively repatriated as text, even as the original manuscripts stayed in Japan.

A photographic facsimile published in 1969 reproduced the Kōnin-era manuscripts, drawing chiefly on the Shōchi-in scrolls and gathering twenty-seven scrolls in all. Scholars still work from it.

Why It Ranks Among the Nation's Treasures

The value of these scrolls runs on two tracks. The first is the text itself. Because the Wenguan Cilin was compiled in the seventh century and preserved Han, Six Dynasties and early Tang writing arranged by form, it carries pieces that survive nowhere else. For specialists in early Chinese literature, a single recovered scroll can restore a poem or a memorial that would otherwise be known only by its title.

The second is the manuscript as a physical object. A copy made in 823 is among the oldest surviving witnesses to the work anywhere, and the brushwork preserves a style of writing from a period when Japanese scribes were absorbing continental models. The Agency for Cultural Affairs records the holding as twelve scrolls in the category of calligraphy and classical texts, spanning the Tang to Heian periods.

Both China and Japan are listed as the work's country of origin in the official record, a small detail that captures the object's double life. It was born in Tang Chang'an and saved on a Japanese mountain.

What to Look For

The scrolls are not kept on permanent display, and Shōchi-in is first of all a working temple rather than a museum. When the Wenguan Cilin does appear, it is usually at the Kōyasan Reihōkan, the museum that conserves and shows the treasures held across Mount Kōya's temples. Past exhibitions there have featured the work, including shows devoted to Shōchi-in's own holdings.

For a reader standing in front of a scroll, the thing to notice is the regularity of the columns of characters and the disciplined hand. This is a copy made for use and study, not for show, and that restraint is part of what makes it valuable. The text was meant to be read.

The temple that kept it

Shōchi-in was founded in the Eikyū era, between 1113 and 1117, by the scholar-monk Kyōkaku Shōchibō. It was revived in the Kamakura period by Dōhan, counted among the so-called Eight Eminent Monks of Kōya, and the temple built a long reputation as a centre of learning. In later centuries the Kuroda house of Chikuzen and the Shimazu house of Satsuma were among its patrons. Alongside the scrolls it holds Buddhist images, paintings and other texts, with Amida Nyorai as its principal object of worship.

Visiting Shōchi-in and Mount Kōya

Shōchi-in stands north of the Danjō Garan, the central temple complex, among a street of temples shaded by old cedars. It operates as a shukubō, a temple lodging, so visitors can stay overnight, share the morning service and eat shōjin ryōri, the vegetarian cuisine of the monasteries.

The temple's dry-landscape garden is worth the visit on its own. Laid out in 1952 by the modern garden designer Mirei Shigemori, it sets more than sixty stones against the rock face known as Myōjin-iwa, named for a tradition that Dōhan sensed the presence of a deity at the spot. The composition draws on the spare logic of ink painting, and the moss is allowed to do much of the work. The garden is a Registered Monument for its scenic value.

Mount Kōya is reached by the Nankai railway line to Gokurakubashi, then the cable car up to Kōyasan station, with local buses running through the town. To see the scrolls, check whether the Reihōkan has them on view during your visit, since their appearances are occasional rather than regular.

Around the Mountain

Mount Kōya forms part of the UNESCO World Heritage listing for the sacred sites and pilgrimage routes of the Kii mountains, and a single temple visit sits naturally within a longer day on the mountain. The Danjō Garan, with its great vermilion Konpon Daitō pagoda, marks the spiritual heart of the complex founded by Kūkai. Kongōbu-ji, the head temple of the Kōyasan Shingon school, lies a short walk away.

Okunoin, at the eastern end of the town, is the most atmospheric site of all: a long avenue of stone monuments under towering cryptomeria, leading to the mausoleum of Kūkai. The Reihōkan museum, near the Danjō Garan, is the place to plan around if seeing designated treasures is a priority.