National Treasures & Important Cultural Properties
of National Institutes for Cultural Heritage, Japan

This set of folded books contains secret stories (hiden) about Prince Regent Shōtoku, along with the records of Hōryūji temple. It is also known as Shōtoku Taishi-den Shiki (a private version of Prince Regent Shōtoku's Biography). Kenshin, a priest of Hōryūji temple, made them into two books in the early thirteenth century. In the first volume, he writes secret stories of Horyuji temple and Shōtoku that his master Ryusen passed onto him. In the second volume, he introduces secret stories of Chōshimaro, a bodyguard and attendant of Shōtoku and states that he himself is a direct descendant of Chōshimaro. N-18 is a manuscript handwritten by Kenshin, with numerous revisions and corrections. N-19 is a hand-copy of the finished version in the Muromachi period, with well-organized content. The order of the stories and the lengths of each of them in N-19 differ from N-18 considerably. This work is divided into three volumes today.