Question

Evaluate the role of Buddhist missionaries in printing culture.

Hint:

Show three things: how missionaries carried the technology from China to Japan, which early printed book they produced, and why religious practice created a demand for thousands of identical copies.

Answer 1

Concept:

• A new technology survives only if someone needs a great many identical copies of something.
• In East Asia that need came from religion, and the missionaries who carried the religion carried the technology with it.

Step 1: Identify who needed thousands of identical copies.
Buddhist practice held that reproducing and giving away scripture earned merit. A single monastery might therefore want copies of a sutra by the hundred, which no team of scribes could supply.
Printing solved a problem that religion had created.

Step 2: Follow the technology as it moved with the faith.
Missionaries travelling from China into Japan carried hand-printing with them around AD 768 to 770. The technique crossed a sea not as trade goods but as part of religious work.

Step 3: Look at what came off those early presses.
The oldest Japanese book still surviving is the Buddhist Diamond Sutra of AD 868, made up of six sheets of text together with woodcut illustrations. The earliest printed books of the region are religious ones.

Step 4: Note the wider effect on reading.
Because scripture was meant for all believers and not for a narrow class, printed matter circulated widely and cheaply. Printing therefore took root as a normal part of life, and in time books of poetry and prose were published in the same way.

Final Answer: Buddhist missionaries supplied early printing with its purpose, its market and its route. They needed scripture in bulk, they produced the oldest dated printed books such as the Diamond Sutra, and they carried the technique from China into Japan.