Temple Bell

Bonshō: Japan's Oldest Dated Temple Bell at Myōshin-ji

On the inside wall of a bell cast more than thirteen centuries ago, a single line of raised characters records the day it was finished: the thirteenth day of the fourth month of the year 698. That dated inscription makes the bonshō, the temple bell now kept at Myōshin-ji in Kyoto, the oldest bell in Japan whose age is fixed by its own words. It rises about 151 centimeters from loop to rim, with a mouth 86 centimeters across, and today rests inside the temple's Dharma Hall rather than hanging in a belfry.

Most visitors come to this hall for the dragon painted on its ceiling. The bell in the corner is older than almost anything else they will see in Kyoto.

A Bell That Names Its Own Origins

The inscription does more than supply a date. Cast in relief on the inner surface, it also names where the bell was made and the man responsible for it: Kasuya, a district in what is now the eastern part of Fukuoka City on the island of Kyushu, and a local official recorded as Tsukiyone no Muraji Hirokuni, generally read as the bell's patron. Few objects from this period in Japan carry so much information about their own making, and fewer can be dated with such confidence.

One word in the text carries unexpected weight. It writes "district" with the character hyō (評) rather than the character gun (郡) that became standard after the Taihō legal code took effect in 701. Officials used hyō only before that reform. The spelling of the inscription therefore supports the year 698 on its own, quite apart from the calendar date it names.

Why the Bell Matters

Among the bells that survive from the Asuka and Nara periods, only about four bear inscriptions, and this is the earliest of them. Its value rests on a rare combination of facts: the year of casting, the place of casting, and the caster are all known. That lets historians fix the bell to a precise moment in early Japanese metalwork instead of estimating its age from style.

The shape itself rewards a slow look. The body is tall and narrow, the mouth kept small in relation to the height, which gives the bell an upright, balanced profile and lifts its visual weight toward the top. Small raised bosses, large-headed and set closely in four tiers of seven, cover the shoulder. Bands of continuous arabesque run around the upper and lower body, and the panel where the striker meets the bell carries a lotus design.

A second bell almost identical in form survives at Kanzeon-ji in Dazaifu, also a National Treasure. Researchers treat the pair as products of the same Kyushu workshop, alike enough in their proportions and ornament to be called sister bells. Myōshin-ji's bell was listed as an Important Cultural Property in 1902 and raised to National Treasure status in 1951.

The Sound Called Ōshikichō

The bell is known almost as much for its voice as for its age. Its tone falls close to ōshikichō, one of the pitches of gagaku, the music of the imperial court, and from this it took the name "the Ōshikichō bell." The fourteenth-century essayist Yoshida Kenkō praised that very quality in his Essays in Idleness (Tsurezuregusa), where he wrote that the voice of a bell ought to sound in ōshikichō, a pitch he linked with impermanence, and named a temple called Jōkongō-in as having it.

That passage also hints at how a bell cast in Kyushu reached Kyoto. The bell is understood to have belonged to Jōkongō-in, a temple no longer standing, before it came to Myōshin-ji. For most of the twentieth century it still rang. Until 1973 it was sounded on New Year's Eve and broadcast across Japan on the NHK program Yuku Toshi Kuru Toshi as one of the bells that mark the turning of the year. It has since been retired from striking to protect it.

Seeing the Bell Today

The bell sits inside the Hattō, the Dharma Hall, built in 1656 and itself an Important Cultural Property. Visitors reach it on a guided circuit of the hall, which shares the room with one of Kyoto's most photographed ceilings: a vast cloud dragon painted by Kanō Tanyū across a circle roughly twelve meters wide. The dragon is nicknamed the "eight-direction glare," since its eyes seem to find you from any point on the floor.

Because the original no longer rings, staff play a recording of its tone during the tour, so you can hear the ōshikichō pitch that Kenkō admired without the bell being struck. A guide leads each group at a steady pace and explains what you are looking at, which makes the short visit easy to follow even if you read no Japanese.

Around Myōshin-ji

Myōshin-ji is less a single temple than a walled monastic town. As the head temple of the Myōshin-ji branch of Rinzai Zen, it gathers more than forty sub-temples along quiet gravel lanes. Several open their gardens to the public; Taizō-in, with its dry landscape garden and a famous ink painting, is the best known and lies a few minutes inside the main gate.

The temple stands at the western edge of the city, within walking or short tram distance of three of Kyoto's World Heritage sites. Ninna-ji, the rock garden of Ryōan-ji, and the golden pavilion of Kinkaku-ji all sit along the Kinukake-no-michi road to the north. Travelers heading on to Kyushu can also seek out the bell's sister at Kanzeon-ji in Dazaifu and compare the two by ear and by eye.