Lotus Sutra

One of the texts here, a 12th-century rendering of part of what’s known as the Lotus Sutra, shows an unusual variation in the thickness of the lines.

Other objects include a copy of the Lotus Sutra in a lavishly decorated scroll, written in gold and silver ink, and a Chinese illustrated manuscript of the Guanyin Sutra, which dates from the 9th-10th centuries and has a rare early depiction of a woman giving birth.

The most popular Buddhist scripture of Murasaki’s day was the Lotus Sutra.

It’s not clear whether one of the most precious works in the show, a Lotus Sutra from Nara, Japan — designated a Japanese National Treasure — is a specifically “Genji”-related sutra, one that combined excerpts from “Genji” with scripture from the sutra.

By the late 12th century, the influence of Genji was already such that a new kind of Lotus Sutra emerged with the specific aim of rescuing its author from hell for, as McCormickwrites in the catalogue, “having succumbed to the lure of seductive fictions.”