Activities of the Sutra Copying Bureau at Todaiji Temple (based on the Shosoin documents)

The Shōshōin documents (正倉院文書, shōshōinmonjo) are the 8th century corpus of documents that contains more than 10,000 scrolls of general and special documentation of the sutra copying bureau (scriptorium, 写経所) at at Tōdaiji Temple (東大寺). The study of these documents is now a separate field in Japanese historical science, as one of their features is the rich anthropological material, which allows not only to study the events, institutions, and sources of the Nara period, but also to enter the microhistorical space of this era. In this paper, the author turned to the documents of the project on the correspondence of sutras of 754, which is called by scholars "the Three Sutras Project" (三部経写経事業, sanbukyo:jigyo), and pursues the following objectives: translation into Russian of the 11 documents of the Three Sutras Project discovered so far; anthropological analysis and commentary of the documents; elucidation of the peculiarities of the general and special documentation of the scriptorium: peculiarities of language and terminology, characteristics of each form created in the course of work on the projects; a detailed reconstruction of the life and work of scriptorium in the framework of the Three Sutras Project of 754, reconstructing the main stages of the project and their characteristics; describing modern methods of research on Shōshōin documents used by Japanese scholars.