The Lotus Sutra in Large Letters (Volume 3 Missing) (Meizan

A Lotus Sutra in Outsized Characters, Marked Up by Hand

The full Lotus Sutra was traditionally copied across eight scrolls. The set kept at Ryūkō-in, a temple on the sacred mountain of Kōya in Wakayama Prefecture, was brushed in characters far larger than the tight columns of an ordinary eighth-century copy, and seven of its eight scrolls survive; the third was lost somewhere along its long history. Even on its own, an outsized Nara-period sutra in this condition would be a notable survival.

What earns it the rank of National Treasure is a second layer, added roughly three centuries after the text was written. Around the turn of the twelfth century, a learned Kōyasan monk named Myōsan read his way through these scrolls and annotated them for reading aloud. His marks turned an old scripture into something scarcer still: a witness, attributable to a named scholar, of how a reader of the late Heian period actually construed a Chinese-language text.

An Eighth-Century Copy, Written Large

The Lotus Sutra (Myōhō Renge-kyō) is among the most influential scriptures in East Asian Buddhism. In Nara-period Japan it was prized as a text of expiation and of national protection, and copying it was held to generate religious merit. When Emperor Shōmu ordered provincial temples established across the country, the Lotus Sutra was among the works to be transcribed and enshrined. Sutra-copying on this scale was largely a state enterprise, carried out by trained copyists in official scriptoria who worked to a strict house style.

This set departs from that norm in one immediately visible way. A standard copy packed many small, evenly spaced characters into each ruled line; a large-character sutra (daiji-kyō) does the opposite, setting fewer, much bigger glyphs to the line so that the scrolls run longer and the writing takes on a deliberate, almost monumental weight. Standing before such a scroll, a reader feels the difference before reading a single word: the script asks to be approached slowly.

The copy itself dates to the Nara period, the eighth century. No copyist's name or exact year survives with it, so it is described simply by its era. The original eight scrolls held the complete text; with the third now missing, the surviving seven are what carry the designation, accompanied by a single sutra wrapper (kyōchitsu) recognized as an attached item.

Why a Monk's Reading Notes Made It a National Treasure

For centuries, the Buddhist canon in Japan was written in Classical Chinese, a language read rather than spoken. To read such a text aloud in Japanese, scholars devised a system of marks placed alongside the characters: small symbols indicating the order in which to take the words, dots and kana for grammatical endings and particles. These reading aids are called kunten. To a historian of the Japanese language, a manuscript carrying them is invaluable, because it records, mark by mark, exactly how the text was understood and voiced at a particular moment in the past.

Most annotated manuscripts that survive cannot be linked to the person who added the marks. This one can. The official name calls it the "Myōsan self-annotated copy" (Myōsan jiten-bon), meaning the kunten are Myōsan's own work. Pairing an eighth-century scripture with the personal reading marks of an identifiable late-eleventh-century scholar gives the object a double value, as calligraphy and classics on one hand and as evidence for the history of the language on the other. It was designated a National Treasure in 1952.

Myōsan (1021–1106) was no minor figure. He stood at the center of Kōyasan's medieval revival and founded the Chūin-ryū, a lineage of Shingon ritual practice that bears the name of his cloister. He is said to have lived at the Chū-in, the sub-temple later known as Ryūkō-in and remembered by tradition as the residence of Kūkai, the founder of Shingon Buddhism. That a scholar of his standing sat with these scrolls and worked through them line by line is part of what the designation honors.

Mount Kōya and the Temple That Keeps It

Ryūkō-in is a special head temple (bekkaku honzan) of Kōyasan Shingon Buddhism, with Dainichi Nyorai as its principal image. Anciently called the Chū-in, it is bound up with the early history of the mountain itself. There is a quiet thread running through that history: the monk who first set about restoring a neglected Kōyasan, Jōyo, was so devoted to the Lotus Sutra that he became known as the sutra-keeping holy man, and Myōsan worked under him. The same scripture that drew this set its careful annotations ran through the circle of monks who brought the mountain back to life.

Visitors should know what they can and cannot expect to see. Fragile manuscripts of this rank are not kept on permanent display. The set is managed by the Kōyasan Cultural Property Preservation Society and housed at the Kōyasan Reihōkan, the mountain's museum of sacred treasures, where it appears only in occasional special exhibitions. Anyone hoping to view this particular work should check the Reihōkan's exhibition schedule before traveling.

That said, a trip to Kōya rewards the effort regardless. The Reihōkan rotates an extraordinary collection of Buddhist painting, sculpture, and manuscript through its galleries, and a short walk away lie the Danjō Garan, the original ritual core of the monastery, and Kongōbu-ji, the head temple. Reaching the mountain is itself part of the experience: a train into the hills south of Osaka, a cable car up the steep final slope, and a bus through the temple town that has grown up among the cedars.