When you visit a temple of the Shikoku Eighty-Eight Sacred Sites, you perform a service before the main hall and the Daishidō. You offer candles and incense, then proceed through the words of repentance, the Three Refuges, and the Ten Good Precepts to the Heart Sutra. Placed just before that Heart Sutra is the kaikyōge.

Only twenty-eight Chinese characters. Yet within these four lines lies the fundamental sense of Buddhism: what it means to encounter the teaching. Let us first look at the verse itself.

The structure of the four lines is simple. The first two praise the preciousness of the teaching and the difficulty of encountering it; the last two express the joy of having encountered it now, and the wish to understand it. A Ming-dynasty commentary explains it the same way: the first two lines praise how hard the wondrous Dharma is to meet, and the last two are the joyful arising of the vow.

Concerning the difficulty of meeting spoken of in the second line, the sutras tell a famous parable. A single log floats on the great ocean, with one small hole in it. At the bottom of the sea lives a blind turtle that surfaces only once every hundred years. And at the very moment the turtle lifts its head, its neck happens to slip into that hole. To be born in human form and encounter the Buddha's teaching is harder still. This is the parable of the blind turtle and the floating log.

The kaikyōge is not a quotation from any single sutra. Each of the four lines goes back to the words of Mahāyāna scriptures that have long been widely read. Before reading a sutra, one recites a verse made of the words of the sutras. It is a fitting way for the verse to have come into being. Let us look at the principal sources, together with their original texts.

The phrase "the true meaning of the Tathāgata" in the fourth line goes back to the title of the first chapter of the Śrīmālā Sutra, translated in the fifth century: the "Chapter on the Merit of the True Meaning of the Tathāgata." Only the third line, "I now see, hear, and am able to receive and uphold it," has no matching antecedent anywhere in the Chinese Buddhist canon. It is best understood as a line newly composed, as the words of the person reciting, when the four lines were brought together.

When, then, does the kaikyōge appear with all four lines in place? An exhaustive full-text search of the Chinese Buddhist canon (the CBETA and SAT databases) allows us to follow its footsteps quite clearly.

The oldest extant text to carry both the four lines and the name kaikyōge is the opening of the Commentary on the Diamond Sutra by the Southern Song Chan monk Yefu Daochuan (read Yabu Dōsen in Japanese), whose preface is dated 1179. The verse appears there as part of the preliminaries for those reciting the Diamond Sutra: the mantra for purifying the karma of speech, the invocation of the Eight Vajra Beings, and the sutra-opening verse. The kaikyōge, in other words, grew up in the popular practice of reciting the Diamond Sutra. It then settled, in the Yuan dynasty, into the monastic codes of the Chan and Vinaya schools, and in the Ming into the books of daily recitation, taking its present form.

One story often told about the origin of the kaikyōge holds that Empress Wu Zetian of the Tang composed it out of her joy when the new translation of the Flower Garland Sutra was completed. In China the story is widely cherished as a beautiful anecdote.

What the present survey was able to confirm is this. The preface the empress herself wrote for the Flower Garland Sutra survives in full, and the kaikyōge is not in it. A full-text search of the Chinese Buddhist canon turns up no Tang or Song record attributing the verse to her. The four lines first appear in the literature from the Southern Song onward, and the written attribution to Empress Wu appears only in the modern era. The oldest confirmed record is a remark by the Tiantai master Dixian (1858–1932): "by tradition this verse is said to be a composition of Empress Wu" — phrased in the tentative form "by tradition it is said" (相傳), not as Dixian's own conclusion. What the sources show is that the kaikyōge is not a verse handed down under any author's name, but one that grew up within the tradition of recitation.

And yet the legend has a root. As we saw above, the verse that may be called the model of the second line, "hard to hear even in a hundred thousand myriad kalpas," stands precisely in the eighty-fascicle Flower Garland Sutra translated by imperial decree of Empress Wu. Moreover, the empress's own preface contains the words, "after five hundred years I have unexpectedly encountered the voice of the Buddha" and "one glimpse of the precious verses filled my heart with joy" — expressions of difficult encounter and delight in the scripture's verses that echo the very spirit of the kaikyōge's second line. The legend is naturally understood as a memory of the verse's origins and the empress's preface, reshaped into the story of a person.

The kaikyōge itself had not yet taken shape in the days of Kōbō Daishi Kūkai. Yet the very heart of this verse is written, unmistakably, in his works.

Read with the eye of Shingon, "the Tathāgata" deepens into the Dharma-body Mahāvairocana; "the true meaning" into the depths of one's own mind; and "to receive and uphold" into the working of kaji (mutual empowerment), in which the Buddha's great compassion and our own faith answer one another. And the wish "may I understand" becomes the entrance to the practice spoken of in the verse of the Secret Key: a single word contains a thousand truths, and in this very body one realizes the suchness of the Dharma. The kaikyōge is the vow spoken at that first step.

In the order of service of the Shikoku Eighty-Eight Sacred Sites, the kaikyōge is recited after the verse of repentance, the Three Refuges and their confirmation, the Ten Good Precepts, the mantra of arousing the aspiration for awakening, and the mantra of the samaya precepts; after it comes the Heart Sutra. This sequence has its meaning. One repents of one's sins, takes refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha, keeps the precepts, and arouses the aspiration for awakening. Only when the heart has been made ready does one at last open the sutra. At that doorway stands the kaikyōge.

When you recite it, do so slowly, with the meaning in mind. Simply resting the heart on the single point, "a teaching so hard to meet, and I am meeting it now," changes the resonance of the Heart Sutra that follows. Whether you come by car, by bus, or on foot, the visit begins from the same verse.

Byōdōji is the twenty-second temple of the Shikoku pilgrimage. When you recite these four lines before the main hall, we would be glad if, somewhere in a corner of your mind, you remembered that these words have traveled a thousand years to reach you, from the Lotus Sutra and the Flower Garland Sutra.

The kaikyōge is recited in many schools, but its form and setting differ.