Excavated Documents from the Wooden Seated Amitabha Buddha of Gaeunsa Temple, Seoul

Among the documents recovered from inside the Wooden Seated Amitabha Buddha of Gaeunsa Temple, Seoul, the old hand-copied sutras (gosagyeong) and old printed sutras (gopangyeong) are written in the script and format used for hand-copied sutras, and include a number of new editions entirely different from those otherwise surviving in Korea. The opening titles (gwonsuje) of the material in hand-copied sutra format are identical in form to those of Sui-Tang period and Silla-period hand-copied sutras, and the number of characters per line is centred on a twenty-six-line, seventeen-character format; among the old printed sutras too, aside from a twenty-four-line, seventeen-character format, most examples have not been found anywhere else to date, making them extremely valuable material. They consist, broadly, of copies or printed editions of the Avatamsaka Sutra (Flower Garland Sutra) produced between the ninth and thirteenth centuries, and evenly include all three Chinese translations of the sutra — the sixty-fascicle Jin edition, the eighty-fascicle Zhou edition, and the forty-fascicle Zhenyuan edition. As material that is extremely rare both in date and in form, it is important not only for its historical value but also as a resource for research into bibliography, calligraphy, editions of the Avatamsaka Sutra, and Buddhist history.

AI Translation

Where it is

Region

Jongno-gu, Seoul

Designation

Treasure · 보물