Printing and salvation in Japan: One Million Pagodas, ca. 764–70 CE

The oldest surviving printed texts in the world (with a few possible exceptions from Korea) are still preserved in surprisingly numerous copies, offering eloquent testimony to the role of Buddhism in stimulating the earliest mass production of printed texts.

In the Buddhist tradition, repeating prayers, invocations, charms, and mantras excerpted from ‘sutras’ (collections of precepts) are thought to accumulate merit, expiate sin, ward off evil, prolong life, and protect the community. Originally, monks gained merit by chanting such invocations in Buddhist monasteries. In Tibet, cylindrical prayer wheels, endlessly rotated by the wind, were thought to equal the meritorious effect of orally recitation. In East Asia, printing subsequently offered a completely different manner of reproducing such invocations in vast numbers.

Between 764 and 770 CE,  the Japanese Empress Shŏtoku 称徳天皇 (718-770) commissioned the printing of one million (hyakuman) copies of four Buddhist invocations – known ‘darani’ in Japanese (陀羅尼) or ‘dhāraņī’ in Sanskrit – written in Chinese characters. Whatever her precise motivations – whether in gratitude for success in suppressing the Emi rebellion of 764,  as a plea for the end of civil strife, or to atone for an inappropriate liaison with a Buddhist monk – her purpose was clearly religious.

Each scroll was placed in the hollow core of a turned wooden pagoda (a miniature representation of the buildings traditionally housing sacred relics and writings), and these pagodas were distributed to Japan’s ten major temples. Whether one million copies of these texts were actually printed is unknown, but the number was very large: as late as 1908, 3000 survived in the temple Hŏryǔji in Nara, and some 1700 a scattered today throughout museums worldwide: the three examples linked here are found in New York, Houston, and Cambridge.

Scholars are divided over whether wooden blocks or – more surprisingly for that time – metal plates may have been used to print the characters. Whatever the method of production, printing on this scale was not seen again for centuries. Buddhism, high quality paper, and printing were all recent imports to Japan from China via Korea, so this activity was also intended to consolidate her authority through these news cultural forms.