 Fujiwara no Michinaga’s diary (1009 AD) mentions that 1000 copies of the “Lotus Sutra” were commissioned but none of these survive.It seems that the paper that these devotional texts were printed on was of poor quality and this explains why so few of them exist to this day.The reason for printing these devotional texts lay in the meritorious act of reproducing sacred texts, not in the reading of them.