Scroll Case for a Buddhist Sutra

Handwritten copies of sutras, sacred scriptures of Buddhism, were essential to promoting the faith. All temples required copies for use in ritual recitation. The text is read from top to bottom, right to left. Since the 1500s, the beauty of scribes’ calligraphy came to be prized by collectors. Many sutras were cut up like this fragment and pasted into albums. Sutras are generally written in regular script Chinese characters. This is the most legible of all Chinese calligraphic scripts—equivalent to clear printed lettering in the Roman alphabet.