Sutra of Forty-two Chapters – (Lanxi Daolong) ◄ Previous Next ►

Artist: Lanxi Daolong

Technique: Paper

The Sutra of the Forty-two Chapters contains forty-two admonitions for Buddhist practitioners on how to conduct their training and daily lives. It was especially prized within circles of Chan ( J. Zen) Buddhism in China and Japan. This manuscript of the sutra has two red seals at the end reading “Lanxi” and “Daolong”; and the calligraphy shows the influence of the Southern Song-dynasty master calligrapher Zhang Jizhi (1186–1266). These factors suggest that this work was written in the hand of the famous priest Lanxi Daolong ( J. Rankei Dōryū). Lanxi Daolong was born in Western Shu, present-day Sichuan province. At age thirteen, he took the Buddhist tonsure at a Chan temple in Chengdu. After traveling around to a number of Chan temples in Jiangnan, he and his disciples came to Japan in 1246. There, he became the Zen teacher to Hōjō Tokiyori (1227–1263), who was at the time regent to the Kamakura shogunate. Lanxi Daolong later became the founding priest of the Zen complex Kenchō-ji in Kamakura, establishing the foundations of Zen Buddhism in the Kamakura region. He died on the twenty-fourth day of the seventh month of 1278, immediately after which retired Emperor Kameyama bestowed upon him the posthumous title of Daikaku Zenji.This manuscript, now mounted as a handscroll, was originally in the form of an accordion-style book that would have opened to show twelve lines of text at a time, six on each side of the central fold.