Temple Bell

The Bonsho of Byodo-in: A Bronze Bell Covered in Heaven

Stand close to this bell and the first thing you notice is that almost no surface has been left plain. Celestial beings drift across the bronze holding lotus stems and flower trays. Phoenixes and dragons wind through scrolling vines. Lions prowl between ornamental bands. Japanese temple bells are usually austere objects, their beauty resting in proportion and patina rather than decoration. This one, cast in the Heian period for Byodo-in temple in Uji, took the opposite path, and no other bell in Japan ever matched it.

The bell stands 199.1 centimeters tall with a mouth diameter of 123.6 centimeters, according to the Agency for Cultural Affairs register, and weighs roughly two tons. It carries no inscription, so its exact date of casting is unknown. The prevailing view places it around the founding of Byodo-in itself, when the regent Fujiwara no Yorimichi converted his father Michinaga's riverside villa into a temple in 1052 and completed the Phoenix Hall the following year. Some references, including the temple's own catalog notes, date the bell to the twelfth century instead. Either way it belongs to the same world: the height of Fujiwara court culture, when aristocrats poured their wealth into visions of the Buddhist Pure Land on the banks of the Uji River.

For centuries the bell hung in a belfry on rising ground south of the Phoenix Hall. Today a faithful reproduction hangs there in its place, and the original is exhibited inside the Byodo-in Museum Hoshokan on the temple grounds. The national register still lists the Kyoto National Museum as its repository, a holdover from the years the bell spent on deposit there before the Hoshokan opened in 2001, so visitors heading to the museum in Kyoto city looking for it will not find it. Uji is where it lives.

Why It Is a National Treasure

The bell was designated an Important Cultural Property in 1914 and elevated to National Treasure on March 29, 1952, under designation number 51 in the crafts category. The official explanation is brief and pointed: among Japanese bells, the richness of its cast ornament has no parallel, and as one of the few surviving bells from the mid-Heian period it is precious simply for existing.

Japanese tradition ranks it among the Tenka no Sanmeisho, the three celebrated bells of the realm. Each earned its place for a different virtue. The bell of Mii-dera (Onjo-ji) near Lake Biwa is praised for its voice. The bell of Jingo-ji in the mountains northwest of Kyoto is praised for its inscription, a masterpiece of ninth-century calligraphy. The Byodo-in bell is praised for its form. The grouping varies in some tellings, with the great bell of Todai-ji in Nara sometimes substituted, but the Byodo-in bell appears in every version of the list.

Scholars have long noted that its decorative program looks across the sea. Korean bells of the Silla and Goryeo periods carry flying apsaras and dense arabesque in a way Japanese bells never did, and the official designation record states that the Byodo-in bell's celestial figures and lions appear to be a refined adaptation of those continental models. A Japanese foundry absorbed a Korean idea and produced something neither tradition had seen before.

Reading the Surface

The bell rewards slow looking, and the Hoshokan's display lets you circle it at close range.

Start at the top. The ryuzu, the dragon-shaped hanger from which the bell was suspended, rears with its mane standing straight up, modeled with a fierceness and realism unusual for the period. The temple notes that the convention of orienting the dragon's head toward the striking point on the bell body is said to begin with this very bell.

Below the domed crown, the body divides into horizontal registers framed by raised bands, and every register except the panels of knobs carries pattern. The upper band runs a vine scroll inhabited by dragons and phoenixes. The lower band, near the mouth, carries hosoge arabesque, the imaginary jeweled flower of Buddhist art, in a design deliberately different from the band above. In the four large panels of the midsection float four apsaras cast in low relief, two raising a single lotus stem, two lifting trays of flowers, all gliding in the same direction so that the procession seems to circle the bell. The vertical bands between them stack phoenixes above dancing and music-making celestial figures, linked by vines so the eye moves without a break.

Each of the four upper panels holds twenty-eight knobs, called chi, arranged four rows by seven columns, each one shaped like a tiny trumpet capped with a hemisphere. The striking seat is an eight-petaled double lotus, set noticeably high on the body. Find it, then look up: the dragon overhead faces it.

One more place to see this bell: in your pocket, almost. Its design appeared on Japan's 60-yen definitive postage stamp issued in 1980, a small tribute to how thoroughly the bell has come to stand for Heian craftsmanship.

Visiting the Bell, the Temple, and Uji

The Hoshokan is included in the standard Byodo-in admission of 700 yen for adults, which covers the garden and museum (the Phoenix Hall interior is a separate 300 yen with timed entry). The garden opens at 8:45 and the museum at 9:00, with last museum entry at 16:45. The building itself is worth attention. Architect Akira Kuriu sank most of it underground so it would not compete with the Phoenix Hall, and inside, low light falls on the bell, the original phoenix roof ornaments, and a group of the famous Worshipping Bodhisattvas on Clouds.

After the museum, walk back out past the Phoenix Hall and find the belfry on the slope to the south. The replica hanging there is no afterthought; the temple removed the original precisely because acid air was eating its surface, and the copy lets the architecture stay complete. On New Year's Eve, visitors may join in striking it for joya no kane, the 108 rings that close the year.

Byodo-in sits ten minutes on foot from either JR Uji Station on the Nara Line or Keihan Uji Station, about thirty minutes from central Kyoto. The approach street, Omotesando, is lined with tea merchants befitting Japan's most storied green tea town, including Nakamura Tokichi, in business since 1854. Across the river stands Ujigami Shrine, holder of what is considered Japan's oldest surviving shrine architecture and, like Byodo-in, part of the Historic Monuments of Ancient Kyoto World Heritage listing. The Tale of Genji Museum nearby connects the town to the eleventh-century novel whose final chapters unfold in Uji, written in the very decades the bell was cast.