Tripiṭaka Koreana, Presented to China’s Last Emperor

MAHĀPRAJÑAPĀRAMITA SŪTRA, KOREAN.

Tae panya p’ara miltagyŏng 大般若波羅蜜多經 [The Perfection of Wisdom Sutra].

Trans. Xuanzang (596-664). Woodblock-printed on bright yellow mulberry paper. 12 lines, 14 characters per line. 149; 150; 155; 154; 157 unnumbered folding leaves. Kwŏn 451-480 in five vols. Large folio (379 x 288 mm.), orig. semi-stiff pink wrappers with decorative floral patterns including medallions of large flowers, orig. five-hole stitching. [Korea]: Koryŏguk taejang togam pongchʻik chojo 高麗國大藏都監奉敕雕造, colophons dated 1238-39, [woodblocks carved 1236-1251, 1937 impression].

One of our most exciting discoveries in recent times: the only known surviving volumes of the 1937 yellow-paper set of the Korean Buddhist Canon (i.e., the Koryŏ Tripiṭaka, K. p’alman taejanggyŏng 八萬大藏經), commissioned by Aisin Gioro Puyi (1906-67), the famous “Last Emperor” of China, during his reign as Emperor Kangde of Manchuria (1934-45). The Korean Buddhist Canon woodblocks completed in the 13th century, today a UNESCO World Heritage, have only been used for a dozen or so recorded printings over the centuries. The set presented to Puyi was printed on exquisite bright yellow mulberry paper made especially for the project, and it was kept at his palace in Shinkyō (now Changchun) until the 1945 Soviet invasion of Manchuria, when it was believed to have been lost. Detailed documentation of the 1937 printing has allowed us to determine that our volumes belong to the presentation set. These volumes therefore constitute the only known remnants of one of the most remarkable and expensive printing projects in colonial East Asia, personally commissioned by the "Last Emperor" of China.

The Korean Buddhist Canon woodblocks, carved between 1236 and 1251 to replace an earlier set destroyed during the Mongol invasion, comprise the oldest intact edition of the Buddhist canon in hanja, or Chinese characters anywhere in the world. The publication of the canon is lauded by Prof. Robert Buswell as “arguably the greatest cultural achievement of the Koryŏ dynasty (918-1392),” producing “the most comprehensive collection of East Asian Buddhist literature assembled up to that time [and] the finest edition of the canon ever to be produced in East Asia” (“Sugi’s Collation Notes,” pp. 130-31). Since 1398, the woodblocks of the canon have been stored at the Haeinsa monastery in Kyŏngsang province. Throughout most of the Chosŏn period (1393-1910), knowledge about and access to the Korean Buddhist Canon was highly limited outside Korea, and even within the country, the canon remained marginalized by the predominantly Confucian elite. It was therefore not until the final years of the 19th century that the woodblocks housed at Haeinsa monastery, “rediscovered” by foreign emissaries and scholars, began to receive international attention for their immense historical significance, and subsequently became widely celebrated within Korea as an object of national pride. Most recently, the woodblocks were designated a National Treasure of South Korea in 1962, and given UNESCO World Heritage status in 1995.

Due to the considerable expenses, labor, and time required to print a complete set of the canon, as well as the inevitable wear of the woodblocks each time they are inked, impressed, and dried, there were only 13 recorded printings of the canon from the 13th century until 1910, the year of Japanese annexation, and two printings during the 35 years when the highly coveted woodblocks were under direct Japanese control (性安, “海印寺八萬大藏經,” pp. 80-83). The first colonial-era printing, in March 1915 on the occasion of the official enthronement of the Taishō Emperor (r. 1912-26), resulted in three sets. One of them, printed with special yellow paper that imitated the historical treatment of Buddhist manuscripts with the oils of the Phellodendron amurense plant, was bound in the accordion format with brocade boards and presented to the Taishō Emperor. The set was kept at the Sennyūji temple and later the Tokyo Imperial University, where it is believed to have been destroyed during the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923. The two other sets were printed with plain white paper and bound as traditional Korean codices. One of them is now held at the Seoul National University (奎15036-v.1-1160), the other at the Archives and Mausolea Department of the Imperial Household Agency in Japan. (On the 1915 printing, see also the detailed report in 小田幹治郎, 高麗板大蔵経印刷顛末, 京城: 朝鮮印刷, 1931.)

In April 1935, the Kangde Emperor of Manchukuo, Aisin Gioro Puyi, learned about the existence of the Korean Buddhist Canon during his historic visit to Japan and expressed his wish to acquire a complete set printed from these woodblocks. Professor Takahashi Tōru at Keijō Imperial University, a renowned scholar of Buddhism, was placed in charge of the printing project, which he was committed to carry out as a properly Buddhist ritual. “On the day of the commencement of the project, September 2, 1937, Takahashi held a ceremony to offer a special prayer for a successful printing. He invited the three hundred resident monks and nuns of the temple as well as all the workers involved. In his speech at the ceremony, Takahashi explained the significance of the project to the audience: ‘This project originated from the sincere [Buddhist] belief of the emperor of Manchukuo, and thus those who are working on this will accrue a great amount of merit.’ He requested that, for the duration of the project, the monastics pray during morning and evening ceremonies for the success of the project and the long life of the emperor of Manchukuo. He further assigned a chanting monk to circumambulate the Canon Storage Hall, ringing bells and chanting dhāraṇī every day to ward off any bad omens or accidents...

“The printing took forty-five days and was completed on October 17. The entire reprint resulted in 1,163 volumes. Takahashi again held a big Buddhist ceremony, joined by two hundred monastics from Haein Temple along with all the workers. Everyone expressed gratitude to the Buddhas for the protection granted during their work and prayed for the health of Emperor Puyi. The printed canon was finally shipped from Keijō (colonial Seoul) to Shinkyō on January 17, 1938.”–Hwansoo Kim, The Korean Buddhist Empire, pp. 51-53 (& see the rest of this informative chapter, as well as the firsthand report of Takahashi Tōru, “高麗大藏經板印出顛末,” 朝鮮学報 2 (1951), pp. 211-24).

The nearby manufacturing co-op of Hamyang County was commissioned to produce the highest-quality pure mulberry-fiber paper for the project, with the technique for dyeing the paper being refined, as was the case in 1915, over several rounds of experimentation. An additional set was printed at the same time for the capital’s Buddhist academy, using what Takahashi describes dismissively as “cheap paper stocked by the co-op.” Each woodblock, when inked, was first used to print the white-paper copy, and then immediately re-inked for the yellow-paper copy, thereby fully saturating the woodblock with ink, ensuring a richer impression for the presentation set. Each finished volume was tacked with paper nails and shipped to the capital to be proofread and stitch-bound (see Takahashi’s report for further details).

While the white-paper set printed during this time is now housed at the Pohyŏnsa temple in North Korea, what happened to the yellow-paper set after it was delivered to the Shinkyō palace in Manchuria is poorly documented in available sources. Several Chinese-language publications mention that a large set of the Buddhist canon (Ch. dazangjing 大藏經) was housed on the first floor of the library building within the palace complex, but give no further bibliographical detail (末代皇帝溥儀與國寶, p. 106; 圖像檔案解密偽滿皇宮, p. 79). On the eve of the Soviet invasion of Manchuria in August 1945, Puyi escaped from Shinkyō with the Kwantung army and brought with him a handful of the most treasured items from the vast holdings of the Shinkyō palace, including four cases of “the Buddhist canon published in Japan,” consisting of around 30 physical volumes (末代皇帝溥儀與國寶, p. 117). If this refers, in fact, to the Korean Buddhist Canon that he had acquired just a few years prior, this is the last mention of the yellow-paper set in existing records. It is well known that whatever treasures remained within the Shinkyō palace were looted and plundered during the ensuing chaos, and modern scholarship generally agrees that the 1937 yellow-paper set has since been lost.

Our copy of the Korean Buddhist Canon contains kwŏn 451-80 of the Mahāprajñāpāramitā Sūtra (with qianziwen numbers 出, 崑, and 崗), the first work within the Korean Buddhist Canon. The text is printed on pristine mulberry paper that has been dyed yellow, and the leaves, rather than being folded into five pages for the intended accordion binding, are folded in half and sewn into a traditional Korean codex, in pink semi-stiff wrappers with decorative patterns. Unprinted title-slips are laid into the front of each volume.

While the binding and the overall condition of the volumes are what is to be expected of high-quality Korean xylographs of the late Chosŏn and the colonial era, direct comparison with the digitized copies of the Korean canon held at Seoul National University (printed in 1915) and Dongguk University (printed between 1968 and 1973) allows us to further identify our copy. The comprehensive survey of the Haeinsa woodblocks carried out in preparation for the 1915 printing revealed a total of 18 lacking woodblocks, as well as 136 individual characters illegible in the original woodblocks (for complete lists, see 小田幹治郎, 高麗板大蔵経印刷顛末, pp. 19-20 for the woodblocks and pp. 47-65 for the characters). Two separate sets of replacement woodblocks were produced during the 1915 and 1937 printings for the 18 that were lacking; they appear elsewhere in the canon and not in the 30 kwŏn of our set. For the illegible characters, wooden types were carved during the 1915 printing and used to stamp the missing characters onto the page, and the types were subsequently preserved in the library of the Keijō Imperial University. During the 1937 printing, when the woodblock-printed volumes arrived from Haeinsa monastery to the bindery in the capital, Takahashi used the same set of wooden type to stamp in the 136 missing characters, two of which are located in lines 1 and 2 of f. 7 of kwŏn 454 of the Mahāprajñāpāramitā Sūtra (see 高橋亨, “高麗大藏經板印出顛末,” pp. 221-22). A comparison of this leaf in our copy with the two aforementioned copies shows that the final characters of lines 1-2 are lacking in the Dongguk copy (indicating woodblock damage) but supplied with the same stamped-in characters in both the SNU copy and ours. The slightly different placement of the characters across two copies indicates the use of type, which is further confirmed by the noticeable indentation of the two characters in our copy. Since these wooden types for the 136 illegible characters were used only for the two colonial-era printings in the entire history of the Korean Buddhist Canon, we are able to confirm that our volumes belong to the yellow-paper set printed in 1937, which is also the only colonial-era set whose location has been unknown.

The identification of these volumes as part of the long-lost set has been one of our most exciting discoveries in recent times. Although no physical volumes from this set have been available to scholars or the public for over half a century, the circumstances around the 1937 printing have already attracted substantial scholarly and popular attention in East Asia and beyond. We have no doubt that further research into these physical volumes will greatly enrich our understanding of the historical events for which they are invaluable witnesses, events that constituted one of the most fascinating and significant moments in the transnational history of the book in colonial East Asia.

Excellent fresh condition. Preserved in the original hantao (which is slightly worn).

❧ 小田幹治郎, 高麗板大蔵経印刷顛末 (京城: 朝鮮印刷, 1931). 高橋亨, “高麗大藏經板印出顛末,” 朝鮮学報 2 (1951): pp. 211-24. Robert E. Buswell, Jr., “Sugi’s Collation Notes to the Koryŏ Buddhist Canon and Their Significance or Buddhist Textual Criticism,” Journal of Korean Studies 9, no. 1 (2004): pp. 129-84. 性安, “海印寺八萬大藏經,” 漢字研究 5 (2011): pp. 69-91. 趙繼敏 & 張立憲, 圖像檔案解密偽滿皇宮 (2012). 馬場久幸, 日韓交流と高麗版大蔵経 (法藏館, 2016). 王文峰, 末代皇帝溥儀與國寶 (北京: 群眾出版社, 2015). Hwansoo Ilmee Kim, The Korean Buddhist Empire: A Transnational History (1910-1945) (Harvard University Asia Center, 2018). 최영호, “1937 년 해인사대장경판의 印出佛事와 滿洲國 溥儀,” 만주연구 27 (2019): pp. 115-27. 박용진, “일제강점기 1937 년 만주국 강덕제 발원 고려대장경 인경과 특징,” 북악사론 17 (2023), pp. 249-85.

Price: $65,000.00

Item ID: 11483