Shinpukuji Kojiki

The Kojiki was presented to the Japanese court in 712. The oldest copy of it that anybody has is this one, made by a monk in Nagoya in 1371 and 1372. Between those two dates there is almost nothing.

The manuscript itself supplies the one link. Its colophon says that Ken'yu, a monk of Shinpuku-ji, copied the first and third books in 1371 from a manuscript written in 1266 by the court aristocrat Onakatomi Sadayo, that Shin'yu oversaw the work, and that the second book followed in 1372. Sadayo's manuscript is lost. So is everything between 712 and 1266. The chain of transmission for Japan's oldest surviving book is a copy of a copy, with five and a half centuries represented by a single sentence about a manuscript nobody can consult.

That is not unusual for an early text, but it is worth stating plainly, because the Kojiki is often discussed as though the eighth-century wording were directly available. It is available only through this book and the later copies collated against it. Every modern critical edition takes the Shinpukuji manuscript as its base and works outward. The consequence is that a question about what the Kojiki says in a particular passage is, in the first instance, a question about what a fourteenth-century monk wrote down.

There is an irony in the custody of this manuscript that is worth drawing out rather than passing over. The Kojiki is the foundational narrative of the kami, the account of the creation of the islands, of Amaterasu and the rock cave, of the descent of the heavenly grandchild and the line of emperors that follows from it. It is the text on which the modern idea of Shinto as a distinct native tradition was substantially built, particularly by the eighteenth-century scholar Motoori Norinaga, whose commentary took thirty-five years.

The manuscript that carries it was copied by a Buddhist monk, in a Buddhist temple, and has been kept in a Buddhist temple's library ever since. Shinpuku-ji, whose collection it belongs to, was absorbed into Osu Kannon in Nagoya, where it remains, deposited for keeping and study at the Nagoya City Museum and designated a National Treasure.

This is a fair picture of Japanese religious history rather than an anomaly. For most of the period between the Kojiki's compilation and the nineteenth century, kami worship and Buddhism were not separate institutions with separate libraries but a single combined religious system, and it was temples that had the scriptoria, the scholars and the means to keep paper safe for six hundred years. The forced separation of the two in 1868 came long after this copy was made.