The Jikji is printed with movable metal type at Heungdeoksa

The book’s full title is Baegun hwasang chorok buljo jikji simche yojeol, rendered by UNESCO as ‘Anthology of Great Buddhist Priests’ Zen Teachings’. In 1372 the monk Baegun Gyeonghan (1298–1374) compiled in two volumes sayings of the Buddhas and patriarchs on the nature of the mind, enlarging a text he had received from the Chinese Linji master Shiwu Qinggong. Three years after his death his disciples Seokchan and Daljam printed it with metal type at Heungdeoksa, with an offering from the nun Myodeok. The colophon is dated the 7th month of the 7th year of Xuanguang — an era of the Northern Yuan then used in Goryeo — and states that the book was printed with cast type. Slanting lines, uneven inking and imperfectly printed characters betray the work of a provincial temple; in 1378 the monastery of Chwiamsa in Yeoju, where Baegun had died, reissued the text as a woodblock edition.

Goryeo had a long tradition of printing Buddhist texts, from the woodblocks of the Tripitaka Koreana to metal type, which came into use in the 13th century to meet the demand for religious and secular books. Earlier metal-type books are known from written records — a ritual compendium of 1234, the Sangjeong gogeum yemun, is lost — and a 2022 study suggested that a copy of a commentary on the Song of Enlightenment printed in 1239 may also be from metal type, while in China bronze type had been used to print markers on paper money. Hence the careful wording of UNESCO, for which the Jikji is ‘the world’s oldest movable metal type printing evidence available’.

Only the second volume of the metal-type edition survives. The French diplomat Victor Collin de Plancy acquired it in Seoul, and it was shown at the Paris Exposition of 1900; in 1911 the collector Henri Vever bought it for 180 francs and bequeathed it to the Bibliothèque nationale, which received it in 1952 (Coréen 109). Its significance was recognised in the West at the International Book Year exhibition of 1972, the site of Heungdeoksa was identified by excavation in 1985, and on 4 September 2001 the Jikji was inscribed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register; Korean campaigners still seek its return.