Goryeo Version of All Sutras (6,27 Chapters in Print/258

A Korean Buddhist Canon of 6,285 Volumes Inside Koyasan's Holiest Ground

At the far eastern end of Okunoin, the cemetery-temple that holds the mausoleum of Kobo Daishi (Kukai), stands a small wooden hall few visitors stop to read about. Inside it turns an eight-sided revolving bookcase, and packed into that bookcase are 6,285 folded volumes of the complete Buddhist scriptures, printed and copied in medieval Korea. This is the Goryeo Edition of the Tripitaka, designated an Important Cultural Property of Japan in 1955.

The full designation records the breakdown precisely: 6,027 volumes printed from woodblocks (hanpon) and 258 volumes written by hand (shahon) to fill gaps in the set. Together they form one of the largest single bodies of East Asian Buddhist text preserved on Mount Koya, and they carry a personal history tied to one of the most argued-over figures of Japan's late sixteenth century.

What the Goryeo Tripitaka Is

"Tripitaka" means the three baskets of Buddhist literature: the sutras (the Buddha's teachings), the vinaya (monastic rules), and the abhidharma (commentary and analysis). In Japanese the whole corpus is called issaikyo, "all the sutras," and in Korea it took its most ambitious form during the Goryeo dynasty (918–1392).

The story behind the woodblocks is itself dramatic. A first set carved in the eleventh century was burned during a Mongol invasion in 1232. Seeking divine protection for the kingdom, the Goryeo court ordered the entire canon re-carved, a project that ran from 1236 to 1251 and produced more than 81,000 wooden printing blocks. Those blocks survive today at Haeinsa temple in South Korea, where they are a UNESCO World Heritage site, and they later served as the base text for the modern Taisho edition of the canon used by scholars worldwide.

Prints struck from these blocks reached Japan over several centuries through trade and diplomatic gifts. The set on Mount Koya is one such body of texts, brought together as printed volumes supplemented by hand-copied ones where printed sheets were missing.

The Warlord Who Gave It to the Mountain

The canon was dedicated to Okunoin in the third month of Keicho 4 (1599) by Ishida Mitsunari, a senior administrator of the Toyotomi government who would lose his life the following year at the Battle of Sekigahara. The plaque above the hall states his reason plainly. Its front face names him by his court title and home province and ends with the phrase i jibo bodai, "for the enlightenment of my beloved mother." Mitsunari's mother, known by her Buddhist name Zuigaku-in, had died in 1594, and this gift of scripture was an act of mourning for her.

Mitsunari did not act alone. The reverse of the plaque carries the name of Mokujiki Ogo, the monk who in 1585 had negotiated Mount Koya's surrender to Toyotomi Hideyoshi and so spared the monastery from destruction. Ogo came from Omi province, the same region as Mitsunari, and the two were close. The dedication came at a tense moment: only weeks earlier Mitsunari had been driven from the capital by rival generals and had withdrawn to his castle at Sawayama. Within eighteen months he would be dead.

Why It Was Designated

Japan's Agency for Cultural Affairs classifies the set under calligraphy and classical texts (shoseki tenseki). Its value rests on several points at once. As a near-complete Goryeo-edition canon held outside Korea, it is a major surviving witness to the textual tradition that the dynasty produced. The mixture of printed and hand-written volumes shows how such a set was assembled and maintained in Japan, with copyists supplying what the printed run lacked.

The dedicatory plaque, designated together with the scriptures as an attached item, fixes the act of donation to a precise date and a named donor, which is rare for an object of this kind. Few large scripture collections can be tied so exactly to a single historical figure and a single recorded motive. The canon entered the national register as an Important Cultural Property on 2 February 1955.

What to Look For

The hall and its revolving bookcase

The building that holds the canon, the Okunoin Sutra Repository, is an Important Cultural Property in its own right. It sits to the right of Kobo Daishi's mausoleum as you face it. Inside, an octagonal frame turns on a central axis. This is a rinzo, a revolving repository, a device long used in Buddhist halls so that the merit of reading the entire canon could be gained by turning the whole library at once. The principal image set before it is Monju Bosatsu, the bodhisattva of wisdom, shown seated on a lion.

The two faces of the plaque

The wooden plaque is worth pausing over because it does two jobs. The outward face is Mitsunari's public statement of filial devotion; the hidden reverse records the monk Ogo and the date, the twenty-first day of the third month of 1599. Read together, the two faces map the human network behind the gift, a Toyotomi official and a Koyasan negotiator, both from the same corner of Lake Biwa.

Print versus brush

The set is not uniform. Most volumes were pulled from woodblocks, but 258 were brushed by hand to complete the canon. To a careful eye the difference between a printed page and a copied one is visible, a reminder that a "complete" canon was something actively pieced together rather than simply received.

Note that the scriptures themselves are a stored property and are not on open daily display. The repository building can be seen from the Okunoin path, and individual volumes occasionally appear in special exhibitions at the Koyasan Reihokan museum.

Getting There

Mount Koya sits in a high basin around 800 metres up in the Kii mountains of Wakayama Prefecture. Most visitors arrive on the Nankai railway line to Gokurakubashi, ride the cable car up to Koyasan station, then take a local bus into the temple town. The whole settlement, including Okunoin, forms part of the UNESCO World Heritage listing "Sacred Sites and Pilgrimage Routes in the Kii Mountain Range," inscribed in 2004.

The Okunoin Sutra Repository lies deep in the cemetery, near the mausoleum at the eastern end. The classic approach is on foot from the Ichi-no-hashi bridge, a walk of roughly two kilometres beneath towering cedars and past tens of thousands of memorial monuments. Reaching the repository means walking nearly the full length of that path, which is part of the experience.

Around Okunoin

The cemetery itself is the main draw. More than 200,000 graves and memorial stones line the route, among them monuments to warlords who were rivals in life: Takeda Shingen, Uesugi Kenshin, Date Masamune, Oda Nobunaga, and Ishida Mitsunari himself, whose own grave stands not far from the canon he gave. The Torodo, a hall lit by tens of thousands of lanterns, sits before the mausoleum.

West of Okunoin lie the other centres of Mount Koya: the Danjo Garan, the original ritual complex crowned by the vermilion Konpon Daito pagoda; Kongobu-ji, the head temple of Shingon Buddhism; and the Reihokan, the treasure museum where many of the mountain's finest paintings, sculptures and texts are shown in rotation. The great gate, Daimon, marks the old western entrance to the sacred precinct.