Jikji

Jikji is the short name of a Korean Buddhist book whose full title is Baegun hwasang chorok buljo jikji simche yojeol. Put simply, it is an anthology: a collection of short passages, sayings and verses by Buddhas and famous Chan (in Korean, Seon; in Japanese, Zen) masters, chosen to help students understand how to awaken to their own true nature. The word jikji, “pointing directly”, comes from a well-known Seon phrase that means “point directly at the human mind; see its nature and become a Buddha”.

Jikji is famous not mainly for what it says but for how it was made. According to the note printed at the end of the book, it was printed in the seventh month of 1377 at Heungdeoksa, a temple outside the town of Cheongju, using cast metal type. No older book printed with movable metal type is known to survive anywhere in the world. UNESCO recognised this when it added the book to the Memory of the World Register in 2001.

The monks printed the work in two volumes. The first volume is lost. The second survives, missing its first leaf, and belongs to the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) in Paris, which has made a digital copy available online. A year after the metal-type printing, in 1378, another group of disciples carved the text onto wooden blocks and printed it again; copies of that woodblock edition survive in Korea.

Written Chinese characters, which educated Koreans used for books at the time, are not an alphabet of a few dozen letters. Each character stands for a word or part of a word, so a printer needs thousands of different ones. To print with movable type, workers had to make a separate little piece of metal for every character that appeared on a page, and often several copies of common characters.

One method described for early Korean type is wax casting. A craftsman carved a character in beeswax, packed fine clay or sand around it, and heated it so the wax melted away and left a hollow mould. Molten metal was poured into the hollow, and when it cooled and the mould was broken, out came a small metal block with the character standing up in reverse, like a stamp.

The printer then arranged the pieces of type in a frame, line by line, to match the text. The pieces were held steady, inked with a brush, and a sheet of thin paper was laid on top and rubbed gently from behind. Korean printers did not use a screw press like the one Gutenberg later used in Europe. After enough copies were made, the frame was taken apart and the same type could be reused for the next page.

Jikji shows that this was hard work for a temple workshop. Its lines are sometimes crooked, the ink is darker in some places than others, and a few characters are printed upside down or only partly. These little mistakes are actually useful: they help scholars prove that the book was printed from movable pieces and not carved on a single woodblock.

Jikji is a textbook for Buddhist practice. Its compiler, the monk Baegun, selected passages from the lives and sayings of earlier teachers, starting with the seven Buddhas of the past and continuing through Indian and Chinese masters of the Chan lineage. Many passages are short stories of a student and a teacher meeting, in which the teacher’s surprising answer helps the student suddenly understand.

The central idea is that the Buddha is not somewhere far away. Seon teaching holds that every person’s mind is originally pure, and that by seeing one’s own nature clearly a person discovers that his or her mind is the mind of the Buddha. The book’s title, “pointing directly to the essence of mind”, sums up this message.

People sometimes call the book Jikji simgyeong, “the Jikji sutra”, but Korean scholars point out that this is a mistake. A sutra (gyeong) is a scripture believed to record the Buddha’s own teaching, whereas Jikji is a yojeol, a set of selected essential passages compiled by a later monk.

Baegun Gyeonghan (1298–1374) was a Seon monk of the late Goryeo dynasty (918–1392). In 1351 he travelled to China, then ruled by the Mongol Yuan dynasty, and studied with the Chan master Shiwu Qinggong (石屋淸珙), a teacher in the Linji (Korean: Imje) lineage. According to Korean accounts, Shiwu gave Baegun a collection of Chan sayings, and Baegun later expanded it into the two-volume anthology we call Jikji. He completed the compilation in 1372, when he was about 75, and died two years later at Chwiamsa temple in Yeoju.

Buddhism was the leading religion of Goryeo and enjoyed royal patronage. Temples were major centres of learning, and they had long experience with printing. Goryeo had carved the entire Buddhist canon on woodblocks twice, most famously in the thirteenth century, when the Tripitaka Koreana was produced during the Mongol invasions. Printing Buddhist texts was also considered an act of merit, a good deed that could benefit the sponsor and others.

The colophon at the end of Jikji records that the printing at Heungdeoksa was carried out by Baegun’s disciples, the monks Seokchan and Daljam, with support from a Buddhist nun named Myodeok. The involvement of a nun as patron is a reminder that women took an active part in Goryeo religious life and in sponsoring books.

The 1370s were a troubled time. Goryeo was trying to free itself from Mongol control, pirates raided its coasts, and the political turmoil that would lead to the founding of the Joseon dynasty in 1392 was already building. Printing a book of meditation teachings with the newest technology in this period shows how seriously the monks took the preservation of their tradition.

Printing began in East Asia with woodblocks, where a whole page is carved in reverse on a single board. Korea preserves one of the oldest known woodblock prints, a Buddhist dharani sutra found inside the Seokgatap pagoda at Bulguksa and dated to before 751. Movable type came later. The Chinese scholar Shen Kuo described how a craftsman named Bi Sheng made movable type from baked clay in the 1040s, and wooden movable type was also used in China and among the Uyghurs.

Goryeo appears to have taken the next step by casting type in metal. Written sources mention a ritual text, the Sangjeong gogeum yemun, printed with cast type in the first half of the thirteenth century, but no copy survives. Another text, a Buddhist song of enlightenment (Nammyeong cheonhwasang songjeungdoga), survives in a woodblock edition of 1239 whose colophon says it was recut from a metal-type edition. These records show that metal type existed in Korea more than a century before Jikji, even though Jikji is the oldest surviving book actually printed with it.

After the founding of Joseon, the state took up metal type on a large scale. The royal foundry cast a font in 1403 (the Gyemija type) and a much improved one in 1434 (the Gabinja type) under King Sejong. Official type was more uniform and better cast than the temple type used for Jikji, and it was used to print government, Confucian and historical books, including the Veritable Records of the Joseon Dynasty.

In Europe, Johannes Gutenberg developed printing with cast metal type in Mainz in the mid-fifteenth century; his 42-line Bible was completed around 1454–1455, roughly 78 years after Jikji. Gutenberg’s system combined a type mould for rapid casting, a metal alloy, oil-based ink and a screw press, and it suited an alphabet of a few dozen letters. It spread rapidly and transformed European society. Korean metal-type printing remained mostly a tool of the state and of temples, producing smaller numbers of copies.

Almost nothing is known about the metal-printed Jikji for the five centuries after 1377. It reappears at the end of the nineteenth century in the collection of Victor Collin de Plancy, the first French diplomatic representative in Korea, who served in Seoul from 1888 to 1891 and again from 1896 to 1906. Collin de Plancy collected Korean books and ceramics; exactly how and where he acquired Jikji is not recorded. By the time he owned it, the first volume was already gone and the second had lost its first leaf.

His secretary and fellow scholar Maurice Courant (1865–1935) catalogued Korean books in the monumental Bibliographie coréenne, and in a supplement published in 1901 he included Jikji and noted its 1377 date and metal-type printing. A note in French on the cover, attributed to Courant, describes it as the oldest known Korean book printed with cast type.

In 1911 Collin de Plancy sold much of his collection at auction in Paris. Jikji was bought for 180 francs by Henri Vever, a jeweller and collector. After Vever’s death his collection passed on, and Jikji entered the Bibliothèque nationale de France in 1950, where it is kept in the department of manuscripts among the oriental collections.

For decades the book sat quietly in the library. Its importance became widely known through Park Byeong-seon (1923–2011), a Korean historian who worked as a librarian at the BnF. She studied the volume, confirmed the significance of its colophon, and in 1972 it was displayed at the library’s exhibition for the International Book Year organised with UNESCO, where it drew worldwide attention as the oldest surviving book printed with metal type.

One question remained: where exactly was Heungdeoksa? The colophon said only that the temple lay outside Cheongju, and the temple had long disappeared. In 1985 archaeologists from Cheongju University excavated a site in Uncheon-dong, Cheongju, and found objects inscribed with the name Heungdeoksa, confirming the location.

The site was restored in the early 1990s, and the Cheongju Early Printing Museum opened next to it in 1992. Since 2000 the museum has made Jikji its central theme. Cheongju has built its identity as a “city of Jikji”, hosting festivals and supporting projects to reconstruct the lost type.

Park Byeong-seon also located, in the same library, the royal protocol books (uigwe) that French troops had taken from the Oegyujanggak archive on Ganghwa Island in 1866. Her work helped start the long campaign that brought those books back to Korea in 2011.

On 4 September 2001 the second volume of Jikji was inscribed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register, which lists documentary heritage of world significance. In 2004 UNESCO created the UNESCO/Jikji Memory of the World Prize, funded by the Korean government and awarded to institutions that preserve documentary heritage and make it accessible.

In Korea, Jikji is taught in schools as a symbol of the country’s early achievements in science and technology, alongside the Tripitaka Koreana woodblocks and the creation of the Korean alphabet in the fifteenth century. Replicas and digital facsimiles are displayed in museums, and a typeface based on the Jikji characters has been released for public use.

From 2011 to 2016 the city of Cheongju funded a project to recreate the lost metal type of both volumes. Using wax casting and the 1378 woodblock edition as a guide for missing text, craftsmen reproduced tens of thousands of characters. Such reconstructions are experiments: they test how the monks might have worked, but they cannot tell us for certain what the lost first volume looked like.

The book also plays a part in public debates about global history. It is often used to challenge the idea that printing with movable type was a purely European invention, and to encourage a more connected, many-centred picture of how technologies developed.

Jikji is at the centre of a long-running dispute. Many Korean groups argue that it is an essential part of Korean heritage and should return to the country where it was made. The BnF, supported by French law on the inalienability of national collections, maintains that Jikji was acquired lawfully, that it now belongs to the shared heritage of humanity, and that it is properly conserved and accessible in Paris.

The case differs from that of the Oegyujanggak uigwe. Those books were seized by French forces during a military expedition in 1866, and after long negotiations they were returned in 2011 through a renewable loan arrangement. Jikji, by contrast, appears to have been bought by a diplomat and then sold at a public auction, so the legal grounds for a claim are much weaker. Korean commentators have therefore tended to focus on loans for exhibition, research access and digital sharing rather than on legal restitution.

The debate raises broader questions that museums worldwide now face: how to weigh legal title against the cultural ties of source communities, what it means for an object to be “world heritage” while it is held in one country, and whether digital access can reduce the need for physical return. There is no consensus answer, and readers will find passionate and reasonable arguments on both sides.

Specialists are careful to call Jikji the oldest extant book printed with movable metal type, not the first. Written evidence suggests that Goryeo printers used cast type at least as early as the 1230s, in the Ganghwa period of the Mongol wars, and possibly earlier. The Sangjeong gogeum yemun is known only through a record by the scholar-official Yi Gyu-bo, and the 1239 songjeungdoga woodblock edition only tells us that a metal-type edition once existed. Jikji’s value lies in being physical proof, with a precise date and place in its own colophon.

Claims of earlier surviving metal type have been controversial. In 2010 a set of metal characters called the jeungdoga-ja was presented as Goryeo type that might predate Jikji. After years of analysis, the national heritage authority decided in 2017 not to designate them as cultural heritage, citing unresolved doubts about their origin and date. Most scholars therefore continue to regard Jikji as the earliest securely dated survivor.

Another question is whether Korean metal-type printing influenced Gutenberg. Some writers have suggested that knowledge travelled across Eurasia along trade and diplomatic routes during the Mongol era. However, there is no documentary evidence of such a transfer, and the technical differences between the Korean and European methods (casting technique, ink, press, the kind of script) are substantial. The prevailing view is that the two developments were independent, although research into Eurasian exchanges continues.

Finally, scholars discuss why metal type in Korea did not produce the kind of “printing revolution” seen in early modern Europe. Explanations include the large number of characters needed for Classical Chinese, the smaller book market, state and temple control over printing, and the continued efficiency of woodblock printing for texts reprinted over long periods. Some historians argue that comparing the two cases through a single model of “revolution” is itself misleading, because the social uses of printing differed.

The key primary evidence is the colophon (ganggi) on the last leaf, which states that the book was printed with cast type (juja) at Heungdeoksa outside Cheongju in the seventh month of the third year of King U’s reign (1377), and names the monks and patron involved. Because the rest of the surviving volume is printed, and the colophon is part of the same printing, its date is generally accepted as reliable.

Physical features support the claim of movable-type printing. The same characters recur with identical shapes on different leaves, but not on the same leaf, as one would expect when a limited stock of type is reused. Lines are slightly askew, ink density varies, some characters are inverted or incomplete, and there are smudges around the edges of pieces of type. The woodblock edition of 1378, by contrast, shows the steadier lines typical of carved blocks. The 1378 edition also adds a preface by the scholar Yi Saek, and its colophon explains that it was made by the disciple Beomnin at Chwiamsa.

The surviving metal-type volume measures about 24.6 by 17 cm and is printed on thin paper folded double in the East Asian manner, with a cover that appears to be a later replacement. Conservation and imaging by the BnF, and comparison with other Goryeo books printed with type from Heungdeoksa, allow scholars to study the shapes and sizes of individual characters. Questions about the precise casting method, whether wax casting or sand casting, remain under discussion, and reconstructions such as Cheongju’s wax-casting project should be seen as informed hypotheses.