EDITION: 1st

Japanese Buddhist relics – a Buddhist monk’s prayer scroll set in the original box. This was probably used by an itinerant Japanese monk and comes frpm the Kongōbuji Temple in Kōyasan Mountain.

Reading some of the texts, scholar Noelle Tinsley comments, “It says “Kōbō Daishi” (i.e. Kūkai, Shingon school founder at Kōyasan temple complex in the Wakayama mountains). Also: “section of [monastic] robe” written with an honourific prefix. It may be meant to indicate this is a strip from Kukai’s robes, which were highly treasured, but unlikely that the enclosed really is. But – someone’s precious relics, it seems. At the bottom it says “Kōyasan Kongobuji” – that’s the name of the current headquarters of the temple complex – it wasn’t always but by the date of these papers, it had become so. Very interesting!

On our right is an expression well-known at Koyasan, and about it, since around the 11th C (I think): roughly, ‘One [pilgrimage] visit to Koyasan will erase one’s beginningless transgressions.’ Sorry for the clumsy translation here. The idea of sweeping away all one’s Buddhist sins by visiting the mountain complex, even just once, was popular – a sort of slogan. In the centre is founder Kūkai, and this is the prescribed iconography based, or so it has always been said, on an original portrait by his disciple in the early 9th C. The pitcher indicates initiation; the vajra is esoteric of course; chair, shoes and so on are Chinese – a nod to Kukai’s training in T’ang. This original is apparently kept in a hall at Koyasan and viewable only by very high-status priests. On the left, once more: “Koyasan Kongobuji Temple administration.”