Publishing the Sutras
Tetsugen, a devotee of Zen in Japan, decided to publish the sutras, which at that time were available only in Chinese. The books were to be printed with wood blocks in an edition of seven thousand copies, a tremendous undertaking.
Tetsugen began by traveling and collecting donations for this purpose. A few sympathizers would give him a hundred pieces of gold, but most of the time he received only small coins. He thanked each donor with equal gratitude. After ten years Tetsugen had enough money to begin his task.
It happened that at that time the Uji River overflowed. Famine followed. Tetsugen took the funds he had collected for the books and spent them to save others from starvation. Then he began again his work of collecting.
Several years afterwards an epidemic spread over the country. Tetsugen again gave away what he had collected, to help his people. For a third time he started his work, and after twenty years his wish was fulfilled. The printing blocks which produced the first edition of sutras can be seen today in the Obaku monastery in Kyoto.
The Japanese tell their children that Tetsugen made three sets of sutras, and that the first two invisible sets surpass even the last.
Chinese manuscript on silk
Printing, the transferring of an image by impression, is one of the most ancient of man’s skills. The earliest printed book in our possession was produced in China eleven hundred years ago. It was found in a cave in Tunhuang at the start of this century, it takes the form of a scroll sixteen feet long and a foot wide and it bears the Chinese equivalent of our date, 16 May, 868. But even this is not the first example: Buddhist charms were printed in Japan and Korea a hundred years before.
So advanced was Oriental printing that in A.D. 932 the Chinese began printing an edition of the classics, and completed it one hundred and thirty volumes and twenty-one years later. Their process of “block printing” is one we use for reproducing pictures; the whole page is carved (nowadays by acid, in those days with a knife) out of one piece of wood or metal. The Chinese language being non-alphabetic, comprising thousands of individual characters representing separate ideas is poorly suited to modern movable type, with its individual letters assembled into a block; and yet even this revolutionary development took place in the eleventh century. The philosopher Pi-Cheng introduced movable type, urged its general acceptance, and his invention died with him.
Source:
