This finely woven red, green and white manuscript binding tape (or sazigyo) has many verses of text interspersed with motifs such as birds, stupas and royal umbrellas. Sazigyo have traditionally been woven by women as acts of merit. ‘Sazigyo’ literally means ‘cord for tying manuscript leaves into bundles’. Women were traditionally barred from entering monastic life as a means of making merit and donations of sazigyo provided an alternative means of doing so. The makers who were commissioned to produce these cords often inserted their own names as well as the donor’s into the weaving. The technique of tablet weaving is complex and time-consuming. Scholars have suggested that the earliest examples date to around the 1780s and that the tradition died out in the 1970s.
