Temple Bell

A Bell Dated to the Day It Was Cast

Most early Japanese temple bells reach us anonymous and undated. Their origins are reconstructed from style alone, an argument made in the language of curves and proportions. The bronze bell at Jingo-ji is the rare exception. Worked into its surface, in characters raised in relief, is a record precise enough to name the day the metal was poured: the twenty-third day of the eighth month of 875, in the reign-era the court called Jōgan. The same lines name the foundryman, the quantity of bronze he melted, and the three court scholars who supplied the words and the brushwork. For an object more than eleven centuries old, that is an unusual quantity of fact fixed to the thing itself.

The bell measures 147.6 centimeters in height, with a mouth 80.3 centimeters across. The man who cast it is recorded as Shigabe no Umitsugu, who according to the inscription used 1,500 kin of bronze, kin being an old Japanese measure of weight. He matters beyond this single commission. The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes him as the earliest bellfounder whose name can be reliably tied to a surviving piece, which makes the Jingo-ji bell a documented starting point for the history of Japanese casting rather than a beautiful anonymous survivor.

It hangs today in the bell tower of Jingo-ji, a mountain temple above the village of Takao in the northwest of Kyoto. The temple traces its origins to Wake no Kiyomaro, the eighth-century courtier who merged two earlier foundations into the institution later abbreviated as Jingo-ji. Not long after, the monk Kūkai, founder of the Shingon school of esoteric Buddhism, lived here for some fourteen years and shaped the temple's lasting character. The bell was cast a generation or two after his death, when Jingo-ji was already a place of consequence.

The Bell of Three Excellences

What lifts this bell above the many fine ones cast in the same centuries is the company of names attached to it. Japanese tradition counts three bells as the country's most celebrated. The bell at Byōdō-in is admired for its decoration, the bell at Mii-dera for its voice, and the bell at Jingo-ji for its inscription. Among the three, Jingo-ji is the bell of the written word.

The inscription was a collaboration, and the choice of collaborators explains the bell's nickname, the "Bell of Three Excellences." The prose preface was composed by Tachibana no Hiromi, a scholar who would later stand at the center of one of the era's sharpest political disputes at court. The verse of the inscription proper, an eight-rhyme composition, was the work of Sugawara no Koreyoshi. The characters themselves were brushed by Fujiwara no Toshiyuki, remembered both as a calligrapher and as one of the Thirty-Six Immortal Poets, a canon of the finest classical Japanese poets.

For a visitor from outside Japan, the weight of those names is easy to underestimate. These were not craftsmen hired to letter a sign. They were among the leading literary figures of the ninth-century court, men whose prose and brushwork carried prestige in their own right. Koreyoshi's son, Sugawara no Michizane, would become so revered for learning that he was eventually enshrined as a deity of scholarship still petitioned today by students before examinations. To gather three such talents on a single bell was a deliberate act of magnificence, and contemporaries recognized it as one.

The state has recognized it as well. The bell was first protected under the old cultural-property law in 1897, and it was designated a National Treasure under the present system on 29 March 1952. It belongs to the category of craft objects, distinct from the painting, sculpture, and architecture that fill most National Treasure lists.

Reading the Bronze

The form rewards a slow look, even from a distance. At the crown sits the ryūzu, the looped dragon-head fitting by which the bell is hung. On this bell it is comparatively large and tall, modeled with a naturalism that catalogers single out. The shoulder, called the kasagata, swells outward in a pronounced curve, ringed by raised lines. The vertical and horizontal bands that divide the body are broad and low, and the upper and lower bands are left plain, without pattern.

The inscription occupies the four panels known as the ike-no-ma, the open fields between the bands, where the characters are cast in raised relief rather than incised. Lower down sits the tsukiza, the boss against which the wooden beam strikes. Here it takes a lotus form, its central seed-pod ringed by five raised seeds. Catalogers note that this striking-boss is small, slightly irregular, and set low, a quirk of an early bell that had not yet settled into the standardized proportions of later centuries. The bell looks backward to the styles of the preceding age while carrying, in details like the dragon-head and the shoulder, the first signs of forms that later founders would develop.

One practical point deserves saying plainly. The bell is not on open view. It hangs inside the temple's bell tower, an enclosed structure whose lower walls conceal what is suspended within, and it is not normally shown, struck, or photographed by visitors. The 2024 special exhibition devoted to Jingo-ji at the Tokyo National Museum, which drew large crowds, did not include it. A visitor to Takao should therefore come to see the bell tower as a building and to stand where the bell has hung for centuries, rather than expecting to view the bronze directly.

Visiting Jingo-ji and the Takao Hills

Reaching the temple is part of the experience. From the bus stop at Takao, a path drops to the Kiyotaki River, crosses it at Takao Bridge, and then climbs. Roughly four hundred stone steps lead up through maples to the gate, a stretch that is demanding in summer heat and transfigured in late autumn, when the slopes turn deep red. Takao is one of the three "Bi" valleys north of the city long prized for foliage, and the temple's grounds are among the most photographed in Kyoto in the second half of November.

Inside the grounds, the principal hall holds a standing figure of Yakushi, the Buddha of healing, itself a National Treasure and on permanent view, so a visitor who cannot see the bell can still stand before one of the temple's greatest works. At the western edge of the precinct, the sub-temple of Jizō-in looks out over a steep gorge, the Kin'unkei. Here visitors buy small unglazed clay discs and fling them out over the valley, a practice of casting off misfortune that is said to have begun at this very spot. The flight of the disc, wobbling or sailing depending on the throw, is half the pleasure.

The hall keeps daytime hours and an admission charge applies. Because the temple sits higher and cooler than central Kyoto, its foliage colors a little earlier, which can reward visitors willing to come before the peak-season crowds.