Osu Kannon Temple (Hosho-in)

Osu Kannon is a temple of the Chisan branch of Shingon Buddhism, holding the rank of bekkaku honzan, a designation of special standing within its school. Its formal name, Kitanosan Shinpukuji Hoshoin, was granted by Emperor Go-Daigo in 1333. The temple stood originally in what is now Hashima in Gifu prefecture and was moved to its present site in Nagoya in the early seventeenth century, during Tokugawa Ieyasu's development of the city.

The temple is better known locally for the market in the streets around it than for its books, but the books are why it appears in this atlas. The Osu Bunko, the temple's library, holds a large collection of classical Japanese and Chinese texts, several of them designated National Treasures of Japan.

Temple libraries of this kind were working collections and not museums, and the distinction explains their survival. Monks copied, collated and stored texts because the texts were needed for study and for ritual, and a lineage of monks went on doing that for centuries with no expectation that anyone outside the community would ever ask. Nothing was preserved because it was rare. Things became rare because everywhere else stopped preserving them. The atlas records the temple as a custodian as well as a religious site, because those are two different claims: what it believes and practises belongs in one place, and what it happens to hold, and how a scholar can reach it, belongs here.

The Kojiki was compiled in 712 and is the oldest surviving account of the Japanese myths and of the imperial line's descent from them. No copy from anywhere near that date exists. The oldest one anybody has is in this temple's library, and it was made by a Buddhist monk six and a half centuries after the text was written.

The manuscript records its own making. Its colophon states that Ken'yu, a monk of Shinpuku-ji, copied the first and third books in 1371, working from a manuscript written by the court aristocrat Onakatomi Sadayo in 1266, and that Shin'yu oversaw the work. The second book followed in 1372. Neither Sadayo's manuscript nor anything else between 712 and 1266 survives. The chain has one visible link at each end and nothing in the middle. Every modern critical edition of the Kojiki takes this copy as its base text and collates the later copies and early printings against it, which means the whole modern reading of the work rests on what one temple happened to keep.

That a Shingon temple preserved the founding chronicle of the kami is not an anomaly to be explained away. Buddhist and kami practice were institutionally entangled in Japan for most of a thousand years, and temple libraries were where texts of every kind were copied and stored. The separation of the two into distinct religions is a nineteenth century administrative act, and this manuscript is a great deal older than the categories that make its custody look surprising.