The Most Successful Publishing Venture Ever

By Will Noel
with April C. Armstrong *14

In 764 CE, the Empress Shotoku of Japan commissioned the one million small wooden pagodas, each containing a small piece of paper (typically 6 x 45 centimeters) printed with a Buddhist text. A massive undertaking, it is thought they were printed in Nara, where the facilities, craftsmen and skills existed to undertake such large-scale production. Marks on the bases of the wooden pagodas indicate that they were worked on lathes, and studies of these have identified that more than 100 different lathes were used to make them. More than 45,000 pagodas and 3,962 printed Dharani survive in the Horyu-ji temple near Nara. Another 5,000 exist in public and private collections around the world. Special Collections has two, one in Graphic Arts and one in the Scheide Library, both of which have their printed text, a Buddhist invocation, or Dharani.

The text is a Sanskrit prayer transliterated into Chinese characters, taken from the sutra: Vimala suddha prabhāsa mahādharanī.

These are the earliest datable printed texts to survive, although there is still some uncertainly as to whether they were printed from woodblocks or bronze plates. There is no older printed text in Firestone, or anywhere else for that matter. Since the purpose of printing text is to duplicate it so that it survives, this is the most successful publishing venture ever, and very likely to remain so until the apocalypse!

Editor’s note: Last spring, Will submitted this post to me (April C. Armstrong *14) for editing as usual just before his tragic accident in Edinburgh.