Tripitaka Koreana

A Tripiṭaka (“three baskets” in Sanskrit) is a collection of Buddhist scriptures: the discourses of the Buddha (sutras), the rules of monastic discipline (vinaya) and scholarly treatises (abhidharma). Different Buddhist traditions have different canons. In East Asia the canon in Classical Chinese, which also includes commentaries and works written in China, is called the Great Storehouse of Scriptures, Daejanggyeong in Korean.

The Tripitaka Koreana is the Korean edition of this Chinese-language canon produced in the thirteenth century by the Goryeo dynasty (918–1392). Instead of copying the texts by hand, Goryeo carved them onto wooden blocks so that complete sets could be printed again and again. More than 81,000 blocks survive. The collection is exceptional for preserving such an extensive set of thirteenth-century printing blocks; the blocks of the earlier Chinese, Khitan and first Goryeo canons are lost, although woodblocks of some later canons, such as China’s eighteenth-century Longzang, also survive.

In Korea the collection is popularly called Palman Daejanggyeong, the “Eighty-Thousand Tripitaka”. The name refers both to the number of blocks and to the Buddhist idea that the Buddha taught 84,000 teachings to cure the 84,000 afflictions of the human mind.

The Tripitaka Koreana is admired for three things at once: its accuracy as a text, the beauty and consistency of its carving, and its extraordinary preservation for nearly eight centuries.

To print from a woodblock, a scribe first writes the text neatly on thin paper. The paper is pasted face down onto a smooth wooden board, so the characters appear in reverse. A carver then cuts away the wood around each stroke, leaving the characters standing up in relief. To print, ink is brushed onto the block, a sheet of paper is laid on top and rubbed, and the text appears the right way round.

Each Tripitaka Koreana block is about 24 cm high and 70 cm wide and a few centimetres thick, and weighs roughly 3 to 3.5 kg (measurements differ slightly between surveys). Most blocks are carved on both faces, usually with 23 lines of 14 characters per face. Thicker end pieces (maguri) are fitted at the ends of each block, which act as handles and keep the carved surfaces from rubbing when blocks are stored. The corners are reinforced with metal fittings. Lacquer can be seen on some blocks, mostly around the uncarved margins, but on most blocks thick layers of printing ink make it hard to tell, so its extent should not be generalised to the whole collection.

Most blocks are made from wild cherry wood (sanbeotnamu), with others of wood such as wild pear and maple. Stories describe the wood being soaked or boiled in salt water and dried before carving, but the precise treatment used for these blocks is not recorded in the thirteenth-century sources.

Imagine picking up one block. It is heavy and dark with centuries of printing ink, and it smells faintly of wood. The characters stand up from the surface in reverse, like the letters on a rubber stamp, so to read them you have to look at them as if in a mirror, or read a printed sheet made from the block.

Each face is laid out like one sheet of a scroll. The main text runs in vertical columns from right to left. Small characters at the edge of the sheet identify the text and its place in the collection, including a character from the Thousand Character Classic that tells which case the text belongs to. With this system, a monk could find any page among tens of thousands.

At the end of each fascicle, the blocks carry a colophon in a standard formula, such as “carved by royal command by the Tripitaka Directorate of the Kingdom of Goryeo in the dingyu year” (丁酉歲高麗國大藏都監奉勅雕造, that is, 1237). Some blocks name the branch directorate (bunsa) instead. The margins also record the names of individual carvers; the UNESCO nomination counts as many as 1,800 different monastic and lay names.

The handwriting style is remarkably uniform across the whole collection. UNESCO notes that the characters are so regular as to suggest the work of a single hand. This uniformity, achieved by many scribes and carvers over many years, is itself evidence of careful planning and supervision.

Goryeo had made a Tripitaka before. In the early eleventh century, when the Khitan Liao state invaded, Goryeo began carving the first Goryeo edition (Chojo Daejanggyeong), around 1011, and finished it in 1087. People believed that this great act of devotion had helped drive the invaders away.

In 1231 the Mongols invaded Goryeo. The next year the court, dominated by the military ruler Choe U, moved the capital from Gaegyeong (Kaesong) to Ganghwa Island, where the Mongol cavalry could not easily attack. In 1232 (the imjin year) the first-edition blocks, then kept at Buinsa temple near present-day Daegu, were burned by the invaders, as both the History of Goryeo and Yi Gyubo’s prayer record.

The court decided to carve a new canon. A prayer composed in 1237 by the scholar-official Yi Gyubo, the Daejang gakpan gunsin gigomun (“Prayer of the King and Ministers on Carving the Tripitaka”), explains the purpose: to ask the Buddhas and bodhisattvas to repel the Mongols as they had once repelled the Khitan. Historians also see political motives: the project showed the legitimacy of the Choe regime and the court, and united the country behind a shared religious effort during decades of war.

The project was managed by a special government office, the Tripitaka Directorate (Daejang Dogam), set up around 1236, with a branch directorate (Bunsa Daejang Dogam) in Namhae on the southern coast. The dated colophons of the main canon run from 1237 to 1248; some supplementary and replacement blocks were made later. According to the History of Goryeo (Goryeosa), in the ninth month of 1251 King Gojong led his officials to the Tripitaka block hall outside the west gate of the capital on Ganghwa to offer incense; the same entry says that the work had taken sixteen years. The Encyclopedia of Korean Culture interprets the 1251 visit as celebrating the first complete printing.

Thousands of people must have taken part: loggers, sawyers, scribes, carvers, printers and officials. Many carvers’ names are cut into the margins of the blocks, and research on these names has helped reconstruct how work was divided. The project required substantial labour and materials during wartime; the sources cited here do not establish how these burdens were shared among different social groups.

What made the Tripitaka Koreana exceptional was its editing. The monk Sugi, a high-ranking cleric who headed Gaetaesa temple, led the collation by royal command. He compared three earlier versions: the first Goryeo edition, the official Northern Song edition printed in China (the Kaibao canon) and the Khitan (Liao) canon. Where the versions disagreed, the editors chose the best reading and explained their decisions in a 30-fascicle work completed in 1247, the Goryeo-guk sinjo daejang gyojeong byeollok (Supplementary Record of Collation for the Newly Carved Great Canon of Goryeo). The UNESCO nomination cites Robert E. Buswell Jr.’s 2004 article comparing Sugi’s methods with Western textual criticism, and the editing is a main reason the edition is valued so highly.

The texts are arranged and numbered according to the order of characters in the Thousand Character Classic, a standard way of cataloguing large collections in East Asia, so that each case could be found quickly.

The canon contains about 1,500 separate titles (1,496 or 1,514, depending on how they are counted). These include the Mahayana sutras that were central to East Asian Buddhism, such as the Prajñāpāramitā (Perfection of Wisdom) sutras, the Avataṃsaka (Flower Garland), the Lotus and the Nirvana sutras; texts of early Buddhism such as the Āgamas; monastic codes; philosophical treatises of Indian schools; and works by Chinese Buddhist scholars.

The largest single work is the Great Prajñāpāramitā Sutra translated by the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang, in 600 fascicles, which stands at the beginning of the collection. Many Indian works survive only in Chinese translation, which gives the collection great value for the study of Buddhism. Besides the main canon listed in its catalogue, the blocks include a few supplementary works carved in the 1240s; one of them, the Chan history Jodang-jip (Anthology of the Patriarchal Hall), carved in 1245, survives only in this Korean edition.

Besides the national canon, Haeinsa also holds 5,987 other woodblocks carved by the temple and by various sponsors, with dates from 1098 to 1958. UNESCO’s Memory of the World registration in 2007 covers both the Tripitaka Koreana and these “miscellaneous” scriptures, some of which survive nowhere else.

After the war, the blocks stayed on Ganghwa, where they were kept first in the block hall and later at the temple Seonwonsa. According to the Veritable Records of the Joseon Dynasty, in the fifth month of 1398, the early years of the new Joseon dynasty, the blocks were brought from Seonwonsa on Ganghwa, and two days later 2,000 soldiers were ordered to carry them to Jicheonsa temple in Seoul. They reached Haeinsa soon afterwards: the UNESCO nomination says in the autumn of 1398, the Encyclopedia of Korean Culture the following year.

At Haeinsa, a major temple on Mount Gaya, the blocks are kept in the Janggyeong Panjeon, a set of storage halls. The present halls are associated with a rebuilding in 1488 with royal support; the Encyclopedia of Korean Culture also dates them from an inscription reported on their roof tiles. The two main halls, the Sudarajang to the south and the Beopbojeon to the north, are long, plain buildings, each fifteen bays wide, with the blocks standing upright on shelves like books in a library; two smaller buildings complete the courtyard.

The buildings are designed for natural ventilation. Windows on the front and back walls are of different sizes and placed at different heights, so that air enters, circulates around the blocks and leaves, reducing humidity. UNESCO credits this design with protecting the blocks from rot, rodents and insects for more than 500 years.

In 1995 the Janggyeong Panjeon became one of Korea’s first UNESCO World Heritage Sites. UNESCO notes that the halls are unique for their age as a building type and for the remarkably effective conservation solutions developed in the fifteenth century.

Sets printed from the blocks were distributed within Korea and abroad. From the late Goryeo period into early Joseon, Japanese envoys asked for printed sets of the Korean canon again and again, sometimes in connection with the return of captives taken by pirates; according to the Encyclopedia of Korean Culture there were 83 requests and 63 sets went to Japan. In 1423 an envoy of the Japanese king asked for the blocks themselves; King Sejong replied that Korea had only one set and offered other blocks and a printed canon instead.

The blocks survived the Korean War and the many fires that struck Haeinsa: the temple burned repeatedly between 1695 and 1871, but the storage halls were spared each time. The Korea Heritage Service, describing a nameplate of General Kim Young-hwan registered as cultural heritage in 2020, notes that as an Air Force group commander in 1951 he is known for refusing an order to bomb Haeinsa, where guerrillas had infiltrated, and so protecting its heritage.

In the twentieth century, printed sets and later photographic and digital editions made the texts available to scholars worldwide. Dongguk University published a reduced photographic edition in 48 volumes between 1953 and 1976. The Japanese Taishō Shinshū Daizōkyō, published in 1924–1934 and the most widely used modern edition of the Chinese Buddhist canon, took the Goryeo edition as its principal base text and collated it with Song, Yuan and Ming editions; the Korean edition has also been used as a standard text for digitisation.

The Tripitaka Koreana is a landmark of East Asian printing. Woodblock printing had developed in East Asia centuries earlier, and Goryeo would also produce the oldest surviving book printed with metal movable type, the Jikji (1377). The Tripitaka shows the highest standards of an older technology used on an enormous scale.

It is also a monument of Buddhist scholarship. Because of Sugi’s careful editing, the Goryeo canon became a standard critical edition for scholars in East Asia and later in the West. Modern research on Chinese Buddhist texts still regularly compares readings against it.

In Korea it stands as a symbol of national endurance and faith, a record of how people under invasion devoted enormous resources to preserving knowledge. At the same time historians remind us of its costs, the labour and materials demanded during a devastating war, and of the fact that the Mongol invasions continued despite the prayers.

Where was it carved? The colophons name two offices, the main Directorate and the branch directorate, and the traditional view placed the main carving on Ganghwa Island, often at Seonwonsa. The bibliographer Park Sang-guk, in the Encyclopedia of Korean Culture’s entry on the woodblocks, argues from colophons and carvers’ names that the two offices worked at the same place, which he identifies as Namhae, and that the link with Seonwonsa comes from a misreading of the 1398 Sillok entry; Seonwonsa was completed only in 1245, when most of the blocks were already finished. The encyclopedia’s entry on the Haeinsa canon, by contrast, allows that the branch office may also have operated on Ganghwa, and Kang Soon-ae counts about 72,600 blocks from the main Directorate and 8,600 from the branch, treating Ganghwa and Namhae as two centres. The question remains open.

Who carved it? The carvers’ names preserved on the blocks, about 1,800 different monastic and lay names according to the UNESCO nomination, provide evidence for studying who took part in the project. Interpreting them requires caution, because the same name may refer to different people.

What is the relationship to earlier editions? Printed volumes of the first Goryeo edition survive in Korea, for example in the National Museum of Korea, and in Japan; a 2011 report counted about 2,400 volumes in Japan and about 300 in Korea. They allow scholars to compare the two editions directly, showing how Sugi’s team corrected and reorganized the text and helping to reconstruct the lost Kaibao and Khitan canons.

When did the blocks reach Haeinsa? The 1398 entries in the Veritable Records are the key evidence for the move from Ganghwa to Seoul, but the records do not say exactly when the blocks arrived at Haeinsa, and modern accounts give either late 1398 or 1399.

The survival of more than 81,000 wooden objects for almost 800 years is remarkable. UNESCO attributes it largely to the halls’ natural ventilation and control of temperature and humidity, and recommends that these conditions continue to be strictly monitored.

The exact number of blocks has itself been studied. UNESCO’s registration records 81,258 blocks. In 2015 Kim Sung-soo proposed a total of 81,352: 118 blocks recarved in later centuries to replace damaged or lost ones, plus 81,234 blocks in his “original-classification” category, which itself includes some later supplementary blocks such as a set carved in 1503. UNESCO notes that the blocks and their shelves need continuous repair, and that fire and theft are the main risks to wooden heritage of this kind.

Balancing access and protection is a continuing question. Visitor entry into the storage halls is restricted to protect their climate. UNESCO notes that the blocks can still produce clear prints, but scholars today mostly work from earlier prints, photographic editions and digital texts, which let them study the canon without touching the blocks.

The Tripitaka Koreana thus illustrates a general lesson of heritage science: the building and the object form a single system, and preserving one means understanding the other.