The Casket Seal Incantation Scripture

The printing of 84,000 rolls of this sutra A sacred Buddhist scripture; specifically the Casket Seal Dharani Sutra., which contained about 3,000 characters, was ordered, and the rolls were placed in holes bored in the bricks used to erect a seven-story pagoda named Lei feng t'a Thunder Peak Pagoda; Pinyin: Leifeng Ta at West Lake in Hangchow Modern Hangzhou, Chekiang Modern Zhejiang Province, in honor of the consort Queen Sun of Ch'ien Shu Qian Chu (r. 948–978 AD), the last king of the Wuyue Kingdom and a devout patron of Buddhism.. For 950 years this pagoda stood on the banks of the famous lake. When it suddenly collapsed in a thunder-storm on September 25, 1924, a number of the rolls came to light, but with the ravages of time most of them disintegrated when exposed The delicate paper, sealed for nearly a millennium, often crumbled upon contact with the air or when handled by locals searching for relics..

The Chekiang Museum The Zhejiang Provincial Museum has a comparatively perfect specimen containing the frontispiece The illustrative woodblock print at the beginning of the scroll, often depicting the Buddha surrounded by disciples.. The Library of Congress has a mutilated damaged or fragmentary copy of this sutra with the frontispiece missing. Originals in varying degrees of completeness are also found in the British Museum, the Harvard-Yenching Library, the University of Chicago, and other collections in China and Japan.

Lei feng t'a Thunder Peak Pagoda, West Lake A famous freshwater lake in Hangzhou, renowned for its beauty and cultural significance, Hangchow Hangzhou, Chekiang Zhejiang, Ch'ien Shu Qian Chu, sutra A canonical scripture in Buddhism, frontispiece The opening illustration of a scroll, Chekiang Museum Zhejiang Provincial Museum, Library of Congress, British Museum, Harvard-Yenching Library, University of Chicago