The Print in the Seokgatap

The best known Korean pagoda deposit was found in 1966, when the Seokgatap at Bulguksa in Gyeongju was dismantled after damage. Inside were a reliquary set and, with it, a rolled printed scroll of a dharani text, the Mugujeonggwang Dae Darani-gyeong. The scroll turned an art historical find into an argument about the history of printing, because the pagoda gives it an upper limit: it cannot postdate the sealing of the structure. That makes it one of the earliest surviving examples of woodblock printing anywhere, and the claim has been contested across national lines ever since, with competing readings of where the block was cut and how firmly the pagoda can be dated.

The find also says something about why texts were buried with relics at all. A dharani is a formula understood to carry protective and merit-making force, and this particular sutra recommends placing copies inside a pagoda. Printing offered a way to multiply copies cheaply, so the technology and the devotional instruction fit each other: the press served the deposit rather than the reading public. Similar reasoning lies behind the miniature clay and metal pagodas found in other deposits, which reproduce the same act at small scale many times over. Read that way the Seokgatap scroll is not an accident of preservation but exactly the kind of thing a reliquary deposit was for.