The Lotus Sutra is one of the most popular and influential Buddhist texts in East Asia. As the act of copying sacred texts was believed to earn a person merit, this particular text was copied countless times. Wealthy individuals often gifted valuable copies – such as this one with gold lettering on indigo blue paper – to temples.
This small fragment of four lines of text is from a long scroll that itself belonged to a set of several scrolls. Given its age, it is possible that the original scrolls suffered some damage; at some point this fragment was mounted as a picture.