A treasure of early Chinese printing
2 BUDDHISM.
A remarkable surviving fascicle from a famous early Chinese edition of the Buddhist canon, printed during the Song dynasty at the Yuanjie (later Zifu) temple in Huzhou. The respect given to Buddhists texts has ensured the institutional survival of a couple of near-complete Yuanjie sets, but any examples of Chinese printing of this age are exceptionally scarce in commerce. We have traced only three works on paper printed before 1300 in Western auctions since 1980. Multiple characteristics suggest that this particular example is from the Yuanjie edition. Phonetic glosses at the end of the fascicle, the size of the printed area, and the number of pages, columns, and characters per sheet, are consistent with other known examples. The first sheet also gives the name of the block carver as Shi Hong. A carver of the same name is known to have been active in the Huzhou region during the Southern Song period and was involved in other projects including editions of the Shuijing zhu (an ancient geographical treatise) and the Lotus Sutra . Scholarly research has revealed that the carving of the blocks for the Yuanjie edition of the Buddhist canon commenced at some point between the 1110s and 1140s. Once carved, they were used to print copies until being burned by Mongol invaders in 1276. Subsequently, this edition was unknown in China until the bibliophile Yang Shoujing (1839–1915) brought an almost complete set back from Japan in the late 19th century. Li and He write that surviving volumes from the Yuanjie edition “are already very rare in China”. Near-complete copies are held at the National Library of China and Tokyo’s Sanenzan Zojo Temple. Scattered volumes are found in other institutions including the Gansu Provincial Library, the National Palace Museum in Taipei, and several other temples in Japan.
Saddharmasmrtyupasthanasutra (“Sutra of Right Mindfulness”). Fascicle VII – “Chapter on Hell: Part Three”. Huzhou: [c.1250] £150,000 [159500] Slim quarto, concertina-style (305 × 115 mm). 17 xylographic sheets, each with 5 pages of six columns of 17 characters, joined sequentially with adhesive, in near-contemporary semi-stiff brown paper wallet binding strengthened with bamboo rod, front cover with manuscript title in Chinese, single page from another sutra used as binder’s waste on rear cover verso. Wallet binding fragile with losses, rear cover detached and front cover just holding at head, worming and splits to first leaf with old paper repair along one fold, contents otherwise unaffected. A well-preserved example. ¶ Li Fuhua & He Mei, Hanwen Fojiao dazangjing yanjiu (“Research on the Chinese Buddhist Canon”), 2003. Provenance: Osaka Bookseller’s Guild (Kotenkai), 119th Anniversary Auction, Osaka, 28–30 May 2021, lot 947; private collection, UK.
SIXTY FINE ITEMS
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