Merit-making and decorated sutras

The Lotus Sutra names copying the sutra and adorning it, building stupas, and making Buddhist images as good deeds for salvation, called sazen. It reached Japan in the Asuka period and was revered by people of every rank. In the Heian period, aristocrats in particular feared the coming of mappō, the latter age when, long after the Buddha's death, no one would practice the teaching rightly; they vied to make decorated sutras, written in gold or silver ink on paper dyed purple or indigo, or on paper strewn with gold and silver leaf over painted designs. The Heike Nōkyō, dedicated by the Taira clan to Itsukushima Shrine in 1164, is the best known: its covers, frontispieces, rollers, and cords are all works of craft. To keep the sutras from decay, people also sealed them in metal cylinders and buried them in sutra mounds, and sometimes copied the text onto clay tablets, copper plates, or stones.

In front of a sutra scroll, look at the paper under the writing: its dyed color, the scattered gold and silver leaf, the grasses and birds painted beneath. None of it is needed just to read the text. What do you think was being wished for?

Copying, adorning, dedicating: into which kind of making would you put a wish?