Among the earliest surviving complete sutra manuscripts

[Buddhist scripture]. Daihannya haramitta kyo, kan dai-nihyaku-nanajushi (Mahaprajnaparamita Sutra, vol. 274).

€ 200,000.00

Very probably the oldest dated Buddhist sutra in private hands, written barely half a century after Japan’s earliest surviving manuscript sutra, today preserved in the Nara National Museum (cf. below) and equally remarkable in its own right as a day-dated witness from 741 CE. This complete volume is among the earliest manuscripts within the Great Perfection of Wisdom sutra corpus and derives its exceptional importance from the fully preserved vowed colophon naming Shimomura no Hiromaro and dating completion to the 20th day of the 7th month of Tenpyo 13 (741).

The final section preserves the colophon in substance as: "Tenpyo jusan-sai kanoto-mi shichigatsu hatsuka, shi-on no tame ni shaki okkitsu" ("On the twentieth day of the seventh month of Tenpyo 13, year of kanoto-mi, copied and completed for the Four Graces"), followed by the name of the donor, Shimomura no Hiromaro, thus recording a vowed copy made for the Four Graces. Such exact dating by year, cyclical designation, month, and day lends the manuscript a degree of precision rarely encountered in surviving sutra manuscripts of so early a date.

The manuscript was originally executed as a handscroll and was rebound in the Edo period into concertina form (joso/orihon; folded album format), preserving the text while materially documenting a later phase of Japanese devotional book use. The surviving patterned outer covers and title label further register this continued life and transmission.

The Mahaprajnaparamita Sutra was among the most authoritative and monumental scriptural corpora transmitted across East Asia, and its Japanese transmission extended to some 600 fascicles. The present volume belonged to the so-called Eongu-kyo ("Eongu Sutras"), a complete 600-volume Daihannya-kyo set (Great Perfection of Wisdom Sutra) whose components originally ranged in date from the Tenpyo period into the early Heian era; around the Joei era (1232-33), Eion, custodian of scriptures at Kofuku-ji in Nara, gathered these volumes and dedicated them as a single set to the Tamaya Shrine in Kawachi Province. The set was later dispersed, making an exactly dated surviving fascicle such as this one especially evocative of that lost canonical whole.

By comparison, the securely dated institutional benchmark nearest in age is the Kongo Jodaranikyo from 686 CE at the Nara National Museum, described in the standard reference works of Kawase (Shoshigaku Nyumon), and Matsumura (Daijirin) as the oldest surviving manuscript sutra in Japan. Many of the institutional comparanda more readily encountered today belong to the later Nara horizon around 800 or to still later Heian survivals.