Printing Woodblocks of the Tripitaka Koreana in Haeinsa Temple, Hapcheon

The Tripitaka is the threefold canon of Buddhism — sutra, discipline and treatise — and this edition was cut between 1237 and 1248. Because it was made under Goryeo it is called the Goryeo Tripitaka, and because the blocks number some eighty thousand, carrying the eighty-four thousand teachings that answer the eighty-four thousand afflictions, it is also called the Eighty-thousand Tripitaka. It was made because the first edition, cut under King Hyeonjong, burned in the Mongol invasion of 1232; this is the second cutting. It was undertaken by the state, through a temporary office called the Tripitaka Directorate, in the hope that the power of Buddhism would turn the Mongols back. The cutting itself was done by a branch office set up at Namhae in South Gyeongsang. The blocks were kept in a hall outside the west gate of the fortress on Ganghwa Island, then at Seonwonsa, and in the fifth month of 1398 they were moved to Haeinsa, where they have been ever since. They are held now in Beopbojeon and Sudarajang. A count made under Japanese rule gives 81,258 blocks, which includes some recut in the Joseon period. A block measures about 70 cm by 24, between 2.6 and 4 cm thick, and weighs three to four kilograms. In all the edition comprises 1,496 titles in 6,568 volumes. What distinguishes it is that Sugi, the monk who directed the work, compared the Northern Song and Khitan editions and the first Goryeo cutting and corrected the text against them. It is now the only way of knowing what the lost Northern Song and Khitan canons contained, and across tens of millions of characters the cutting is even and exact, without a wrong or missing character. For its age and its completeness it is the most celebrated Tripitaka in the world, and it was inscribed on the Memory of the World register in 2007.

AI Translation

Where it is

Region

Hapcheon, Gyeongnam

Designation

National Treasure · 국보