Tripitaka Koreana

A Tripiṭaka (“three baskets” in Sanskrit) is a complete collection of Buddhist scriptures: the discourses of the Buddha (sutras), the rules of monastic discipline (vinaya) and scholarly treatises (abhidharma), together with commentaries and other works. In East Asia this collection, translated into classical Chinese, is called the Great Storehouse of Scriptures, Daejanggyeong in Korean.

The Tripitaka Koreana is the Korean edition of this 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. Over 81,000 blocks survive, the oldest complete Buddhist canon on woodblocks in the world that is still intact.

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 weighs roughly 3 kg. Both faces are carved, usually with 23 lines of 14 characters. Thicker strips of wood are fitted at the ends of each block, which act as handles, keep the carved surfaces from touching when blocks are stacked and help stop warping. The corners are fastened with metal fittings, and the blocks were coated with lacquer.

Scientific study of the wood in the 1990s found that most blocks were made from wild cherry (sanbeotnamu), with others of wood such as wild pear. Later tradition says the wood was soaked in seawater and dried for years before carving; this is plausible but not recorded in thirteenth-century sources.

Imagine picking up one block. It is heavy and dark with old ink and lacquer, 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. At the edge of the sheet, a short line in smaller characters gives the title of the text, the fascicle number, the sheet number and 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, many 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 year dingyu” (1237), with the cyclical year of carving. Blocks made in Namhae name the branch directorate instead. In the margins, and sometimes at the end of a column, small characters record the names of the individual carvers.

The handwriting style is remarkably uniform across the whole collection. It follows a clear, regular script influenced by the Chinese calligrapher Ouyang Xun, which later admirers compared to 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, King Hyeonjong began carving the first Goryeo edition (Chojo Daejanggyeong), finished around 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 first Tripitaka blocks, kept at Buinsa temple near present-day Daegu, were burned by the invaders.

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), with a branch directorate (Bunsa Daejang Dogam) in Namhae on the southern coast. The dated colophons on the blocks run from 1237 to 1248, and according to the History of Goryeo (Goryeosa), King Gojong led officials to a ceremony at the Tripitaka block hall outside the west gate of the capital on Ganghwa in 1251, marking the completion.

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 labour, timber and funds came from the state, the Choe family and Buddhist communities, and ordinary people bore much of the burden, in a country already suffering from invasion.

What made the Tripitaka Koreana exceptional was its editing. The monk Sugi of Gaetaesa led a team that compared three earlier versions: the first Goryeo edition (through surviving printed copies), the official Northern Song edition printed in China (the Kaibao canon of 983) and the Khitan (Liao) canon. Where the versions disagreed, the editors chose the best reading and explained their decisions in a 30-fascicle work, the Goryeo-guk sinjo daejang gyojeong byeollok (Supplementary Record of Collation for the Newly Carved Great Canon of Goryeo). This critical method, unusual for its time, 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. 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. Some texts in the Tripitaka Koreana are lost in their original Sanskrit and survive only in Chinese translation, which gives the collection great value for the study of Indian Buddhism.

Besides the national canon, Haeinsa also holds thousands of other woodblocks carved by the temple and by various sponsors from the eleventh to the twentieth century. 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 remained on Ganghwa, possibly at the temple Seonwonsa. According to the Veritable Records of the Joseon Dynasty, in 1398, the early years of the new Joseon dynasty, the blocks were moved from Ganghwa to Jicheonsa temple in Seoul, and they reached Haeinsa soon afterwards. The exact route and date of arrival at Haeinsa are still discussed.

At Haeinsa, a major temple in the Gaya Mountains, the blocks are kept in the Janggyeong Panjeon, a set of storage halls. Roof tiles bearing a date equivalent to 1488 show that the present buildings were rebuilt or repaired in the early Joseon period. 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.

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. The earthen floors are reported to contain charcoal, lime, salt and clay, which absorb moisture in wet weather and release it in dry weather. The site on a slope of the mountain, facing southwest, also takes advantage of local winds and sunlight.

In 1995 the Janggyeong Panjeon became one of Korea’s first UNESCO World Heritage Sites. UNESCO notes that the halls are an outstanding example of how traditional architecture solved a practical problem of conservation.

Sets printed from the blocks were distributed within Korea and abroad. Throughout the late Goryeo and early Joseon periods, Japanese envoys repeatedly requested printed sets of the Korean canon, which were highly prized in Japan; the Joseon court, which favoured Confucianism, sent many sets. Japanese missions even asked for the blocks themselves, but the Joseon court refused.

The blocks survived Japanese invasions in the 1590s, several fires at Haeinsa (the storage halls were spared) and the Korean War. A widely told story holds that in 1951 a South Korean Air Force pilot, Kim Young-hwan, disobeyed an order to bomb the temple area, where North Korean guerrillas were hiding, in order to save the Tripitaka.

In the twentieth century, printed sets and later photographic and digital editions made the texts available to scholars worldwide. The Japanese Taishō Shinshū Daizōkyō (1924–1934), the most widely used modern edition of the Chinese Buddhist canon, took the Tripitaka Koreana as its base text. The Tripitaka Koreana Research Institute and other organizations have since produced digital versions.

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 reference for scholars in China, Japan 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 resources demanded from ordinary people during a devastating war, and the fact that the Mongol invasions continued despite the prayers.

Where was it carved? The traditional view is that the blocks were carved on Ganghwa Island under the main Directorate, with Namhae only playing a supporting role. Research on colophons and on the branch directorate has led many scholars to argue that a large share of the carving took place in Namhae and elsewhere in the south, where timber was more easily available, and that the blocks were then shipped to Ganghwa. The balance between the two centres is still debated.

Who carved it? The carvers’ names in the margins include monks, commoners and people with official titles. Some scholars see the project as a state mobilization; others emphasize the participation of Buddhist communities and local elites who sponsored individual texts. The names are an unusual source for social history, but interpreting them requires caution because the same name may refer to different people.

What is the relationship to earlier editions? Surviving printed copies of the first Goryeo edition, many preserved in Japan (for example at Nanzen-ji in Kyoto) and some in Korea, allow scholars to compare the two editions directly. This comparison shows how Sugi’s team corrected and reorganized the text and helps reconstruct the lost Kaibao and Khitan canons.

When did the blocks reach Haeinsa? The 1398 entry in the Veritable Records is the key evidence for the move from Ganghwa, but interpretations differ over whether the blocks went directly to Haeinsa, whether some were already stored elsewhere, and whether all were moved at once.

The survival of more than 81,000 wooden objects for almost 800 years is remarkable. Conservation scientists have studied the Janggyeong Panjeon’s microclimate, measuring temperature, humidity and airflow, and have generally confirmed that the passive ventilation system works well. The blocks show relatively little warping or insect damage.

Surveys in the 2010s, including a full inventory that counted 81,352 blocks, found cracks, damaged fittings and some areas of deterioration, and led to programmes of monitoring and careful repair. Because the halls work best when left as they are, conservators generally prefer minimal intervention.

Balancing access and protection is a continuing question. Direct access to the storage halls is restricted, and Haeinsa has experimented with limited guided visits. Printing from the original blocks, which puts stress on the wood, is now rare; high-resolution imaging and digital texts allow scholars to study the canon without touching it.

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.