The Radiant Prajnaparamita Sutra (Volume 9)

Hōkō Hannya Haramitsu-kyō, Volume 9: A Sutra That Crossed the Desert

Volume nine of the Hōkō Hannya Haramitsu-kyō is a single paper scroll, copied in Japan in the year 743 and kept today on Mt. Kōya, the mountaintop Buddhist complex in Wakayama Prefecture. The text it carries is one of the Perfection of Wisdom sutras, the body of Mahāyāna scripture that explores prajñā, the insight that all phenomena are empty of fixed, independent nature. Japan's Agency for Cultural Affairs registered the scroll as an Important Cultural Property on 23 May 1930.

What makes this particular scroll worth a second look is the distance behind it. The words copied here in eighth-century Japan reached East Asia only after a Chinese monk spent the last decades of his life chasing them across Central Asia. The Japanese copy sits at the end of a chain that runs back through China to the oasis kingdom of Khotan, on the southern edge of the Taklamakan Desert.

The Monk Who Went West for the Original

The sutra is named for its first Chinese rendering. In Chinese it is the Fangguang bore jing; the Japanese reading of the same characters gives Hōkō Hannya Haramitsu-kyō. The Sanskrit source corresponds to the Perfection of Wisdom in 25,000 lines (Pañcaviṃśatisāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā), a long sutra in ninety chapters.

That Sanskrit text did not arrive in China by chance. In 260 CE a monk named Zhu Shixing set out from Chang'an. He had been lecturing in Luoyang on an earlier, shorter Perfection of Wisdom translation and had grown frustrated: the version he taught from felt cut short and hard to follow, and he wanted the fuller original. Tradition counts Zhu Shixing as the first ethnic-Han Chinese to be formally ordained as a monk, which makes his decision to leave the heartland for the western deserts all the more striking.

He reached Khotan, then a center of Mahāyāna learning, and there obtained a manuscript of ninety chapters running to several hundred thousand characters. Getting it home proved harder than finding it. Local followers of a different Buddhist current opposed letting the text leave, and only in 282 did Zhu Shixing's disciple Furudan carry the manuscript back to Luoyang. Zhu Shixing himself never returned. He died in Khotan, reportedly around the age of eighty, having sent the scripture ahead without him.

The translation into Chinese came later still. In 291, at a temple in Chenliu, the Khotanese monk Mokṣala read out the Sanskrit while Zhu Shulan rendered it into Chinese and two scribes set it down. The result was the twenty-fascicle Hōkō Hannya Haramitsu-kyō. For more than a century afterward, until Kumārajīva produced his celebrated translations, this was the text Chinese scholars turned to when they wanted to understand Perfection of Wisdom thought, and it shaped a generation of Buddhist commentary.

An Empress's Vow, Brushed in 743

The scroll on Mt. Kōya is not the Chinese original but a Japanese copy made four and a half centuries after that translation. Its closing note records that it was brushed under the patronage of Empress Kōmyō, with a date corresponding to the eleventh day of the fifth month of Tenpyō 15 (743).

Empress Kōmyō (701–760), consort of Emperor Shōmu, was the most important sponsor of sutra copying in the Nara period. Her best-known project produced the body of scriptures called the Gogatsu Tsuitachi-kyō, the "First-Day-of-the-Fifth-Month Sutras," named for a dedicatory text dated to 740 and undertaken in memory of her late parents. The official copying office she supported eventually transcribed something close to the entire Buddhist canon then available in Japan, on the order of several thousand scrolls.

This scroll belongs to a related group that scholars distinguish by its later colophon date of 743, sometimes called the Gogatsu Jūichinichi-kyō, the "Eleventh-Day-of-the-Fifth-Month Sutras." Both groups grew out of the same imperial patronage and the same disciplined scriptorium, where trained copyists worked from imported master texts under careful proofreading. The neat, even brushwork of these manuscripts is regarded as a high point of Nara-period calligraphy.

What to Notice

This is calligraphy and text rather than sculpture or painting, so the rewards are quieter and repay slow looking. The columns of characters run in disciplined ranks, the work of a professional copyist rather than a famous abbot, and the consistency itself is the achievement: a state-sponsored workshop turning out scripture after scripture to a single exacting standard.

The dated colophon is the heart of it. A line of text fixing the year to 743 and tying the copy to an empress's vow turns an anonymous scroll into a document with a name, a date, and a patron. Detailed physical measurements for this particular volume have not been published in the public record, which is common for sutra scrolls held in temple collections, so anyone hoping to study it closely will want to watch for it in a catalogued exhibition.

It also helps to hold two histories in mind at once while viewing. One is the eighth-century Japanese hand that brushed these lines for the merit of the imperial house. The other is the third-century journey across the desert that brought the words this far in the first place. The scroll is a single object standing at the meeting point of both.

Around Mt. Kōya

The scroll belongs to Ryūkō-in, one of the temples on Mt. Kōya and a special head temple of the Kōyasan branch of Shingon Buddhism. Its principal image is Dainichi Nyorai, the cosmic Buddha Mahāvairocana. Local tradition holds that this was the residence Kūkai used when he founded the mountain monastery in the early ninth century, and the temple later took its present name after a legend of a dragon rising from its garden pond bearing a sacred jewel. Ryūkō-in functions as a working temple and does not open its halls to general sightseeing, so the scroll is not viewable at the temple itself.

The treasures of Mt. Kōya's temples are instead cared for by the Kōyasan Cultural Property Preservation Society, which runs the Reihōkan, the mountain's museum, opened in 1921. Its holdings include more than twenty National Treasures and well over a hundred Important Cultural Properties drawn from temples across the complex, shown in rotating special exhibitions and seasonal displays. A manuscript like this one appears when the museum's program brings it out, so checking the current exhibition schedule before a visit is worthwhile.

Mt. Kōya rewards a longer stay in any case. The whole sacred landscape was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2004 as part of the Sacred Sites and Pilgrimage Routes in the Kii Mountain Range. The Okunoin cemetery and the mausoleum of Kūkai, the Danjō Garan temple precinct, and the great Daimon gate are all within walking or short bus distance, and many temples offer overnight lodging with vegetarian Buddhist meals.