Ink on Paper, Written by Todaiji Temple's Owner, Miyano Sho,

A Single Scroll That Funded the Great Buddha of Nara

In the ninth month of 1195, officials from the Suō provincial office and envoys sent down from Tōdaiji walked the edges of an estate called Miyano, in the rice country of what is now Yamaguchi City, and wrote down in ink exactly which paddies and dry fields belonged to the temple. The paper scroll that recorded their work survives. It is known by its full cataloguing name, the Land-Registration Certificate for the Paddies and Dry Fields of Miyano Estate in Suō Province, Held by Tōdaiji (Dated the Ninth Month of Kenkyū 6), and it carries something most administrative papers never do: the personal mark of the monk who rebuilt Nara's Great Buddha Hall.

Look at the document and two features stand out to anyone who knows medieval paperwork. Along the right edge, where a high authority signed off on a deed, sits the brush monogram of Shunjōbō Chōgen. A second mark, called the reverse seal, was placed on the back of the joins between sheets so the scroll could not be tampered with. Both were made by Chōgen himself, the man the court had charged with raising Tōdaiji from its ashes.

Why a Land Deed Became a National Treasure

To understand why a property record matters this much, go back fifteen years before it was written. In 1180 the warrior Taira no Shigehira put much of Nara to the torch. Tōdaiji's halls burned for days, and the bronze Great Buddha cast in the eighth century slumped and partly melted. The following year the court appointed Chōgen, already past sixty, as chief solicitor of donations, the official responsible for finding the money, timber, and labour to rebuild everything.

Money and prayer alone could not raise a hall the size of Tōdaiji's. Timber could. In 1186 the entire province of Suō, the southern half of modern Yamaguchi Prefecture, was assigned to the temple as a construction-funding province, with its taxes and forests dedicated to the work. This was the first time the governance of a whole province was handed to a temple, and Chōgen effectively ran Suō as its governor. He went up the Saba River into the Tokuji highlands to direct the felling and floating of huge logs. The effort took nine years. In 1195 the rebuilt Great Buddha Hall was dedicated, the same year this scroll was signed.

The estate itself has an unusual origin. Miyano, in Yoshiki District, was granted to Chin Nakei (Chen Heqing), a craftsman from Song China who had helped recast the head and one hand of the damaged Great Buddha. Rather than keep the land, Chin Nakei gave it to Tōdaiji. In 1195 the court formally recognised Miyano as temple property, and provincial and temple officials, the registration envoys, fixed its four boundaries on the ground. This scroll is the certificate of that act. It was first protected as a National Treasure under the old system in 1936 and reclassified as an Important Cultural Property in 1950.

What the Document Records, and What It Does Not

Read past the seals and the scroll opens a window onto an ordinary corner of twelfth-century Japan. Miyano was known collectively as Ōuchi village, the district that later gave its name to the Ōuchi warrior house who would dominate western Japan for centuries. The estate registers compiled around this period describe a thinly settled place: well over a hundred chō of registered fields, but only around thirty homesteads working them, with stretches of unclaimed waste close by. The countryside that paid for one of the largest wooden buildings on earth was, on paper, a quiet farming valley.

For a historian, the value lies in the detail. Most of what we know about how the Tōdaiji rebuilding was financed comes from documents exactly like this one. A boundary record names landmarks, measures plots, and pins an abstract financial scheme to real soil. Because Chōgen's own marks authenticate it, the scroll also fixes a date and a hand to the campaign. The same brush that approved this deed belonged to the figure honoured every spring in Tōdaiji's water-drawing rite, where his name is still chanted at unusual length.

The scroll is privately owned and is not on public display. Even so, the chance to see the wider story it belongs to is one of the pleasures of travelling in this part of Yamaguchi, where the medieval reach of a Nara temple is still written into the landscape.

Following the Story Across Yamaguchi and Nara

The clearest place to start is the site of the Suō provincial capital in Hōfu. Most provincial seats faded after the early medieval period, but because Suō stayed under Tōdaiji's administration into the nineteenth century, the ground plan of its government compound survived unusually well and was made a national historic site in 1937. Walking it gives a sense of the office Chōgen took over.

A short distance away stands Amida-ji, the temple Chōgen founded as his base in Suō at the foot of Mount Mure. It keeps a seated portrait sculpture of Chōgen, an Important Cultural Property, and in the rainy season its slopes fill with hydrangeas, making early summer the busiest time to visit. To trace the timber rather than the paperwork, drive up to Tokuji, where the cultural park called Chōgen no Sato recreates the mountain village life that grew up around the logging, with paper-making and woodcraft you can try by hand.

The destination of all this labour lies in Nara. The Great South Gate of Tōdaiji, rebuilt under Chōgen in a bold imported style, and the Shunjō Hall, which enshrines a famously lifelike seated statue of the monk designated a National Treasure, let you stand at the end of the chain that began with quiet estates like Miyano.