Kasatoba

Two Stone Pillars a Son Raised for His Parents

In the seventh month of 1261, a stonemason named I no Yukiyoshi set up two tall granite shafts at the edge of a burial ground on the northern fringe of Nara. One was dedicated to his father, who had died the year before. The other was offered for the welfare of his mother, who was still alive at the time. The two monuments now stand close together inside the grounds of Hannya-ji, a temple in the hills north of central Nara, and they remain among the most precisely documented stone works of their kind in Japan.

The form is called a kasa-tōba. A square stone shaft rises from a low base, and a separate stone cap shaped like a pyramidal roof sits on top, finished with a carved lotus seat and a jewel-shaped finial. The word kasa means a broad hat or canopy, which is what the roof stone resembles. A kasa-tōba is the stone counterpart of the wooden grave tablet, or sotoba, that Japanese Buddhists place at a tomb. Both shafts here are cut from granite. The southern pillar reaches 4.46 meters, the northern one 4.76 meters, tall enough that visitors usually step back to take them in.

An Immigrant Mason and a Date You Can Read

The man who carved these pillars came from a family of stoneworkers with roots in China. His father, I no Yukisue, also read I Gyōmatsu, had arrived from Song-dynasty China during the great rebuilding of Tōdai-ji, the temple complex burned in the warfare of 1180. The Chinese masons brought techniques that reshaped Japanese stone carving, and the lineage Yukisue founded, known as the I school, went on to produce many of the finest stone monuments in the Nara region. The towering thirteen-story stone pagoda at the center of Hannya-ji is also attributed to this family.

What sets the two pillars apart is their inscriptions. Long passages cut into the shafts record that Yukiyoshi raised them on the eleventh day of the seventh month of Kōchō 1, the year answering to 1261, on the first anniversary of his father's death. One pillar prays for the repose of the father; the other asks for the continued well-being of the living mother. The text also credits the I family with the great stone pagoda nearby.

Because the date is fixed and legible, scholars treat the pair as a yardstick. When the carving style, proportions, and lettering of an undated stone monument resemble these, a likely period can be assigned to it. That is the main reason the pillars were designated an Important Cultural Property on April 5, 1909, placed in the category of archaeological material rather than sculpture or architecture.

Sanskrit Seeds, and an Unexpected French Connection

Look closely at the faces of the shafts and you will find rows of Sanskrit letters. These are bonji, single seed-syllables that each stand for a buddha or bodhisattva in esoteric Buddhist practice. The northern pillar carries the syllables of Amida and his two attendants at the top, followed by the five buddhas of the Diamond Realm. The southern pillar opens with the syllables for Shakyamuni and his attendants, followed by the five buddhas of the Womb Realm. Set side by side, the two lay out a compact map of the Buddhist cosmos in stone.

The pillars have not always stood where they do now. They were first raised at the gateway to a communal cemetery south of the temple, the burial ground that served the city of Nara. During the anti-Buddhist campaigns of the early Meiji period, around 1868, the monuments were pulled down and broken. In 1892 they were repaired and re-erected inside the temple precincts.

One detail from that 1892 restoration has drawn fresh attention. To hold the heavy shafts steady, the restorers fitted iron support brackets worked into a scrolling arabesque pattern. According to the temple, the metal was wrought iron of the kind the French had developed for the Eiffel Tower, completed for the Paris Exposition of 1889. The brackets carried the pillars for more than sixty years before being removed in 1958. For much of the Muromachi period, incidentally, local people believed the pillars marked the grave of the warrior Taira no Shigehira, a reminder of how quickly the memory attached to even a dated monument can drift.

Visiting Hannya-ji

The two pillars stand near the main hall, out in the open, so there is no special viewing season for them. Hannya-ji itself rewards a slow walk. Its main gate, a two-story rōmon from the Kamakura period, is a National Treasure, and the thirteen-story stone pagoda at the center of the grounds rises to about 14 meters. The temple is better known locally as a flower temple: kerria in April, hydrangea from late May, cosmos in early summer and again in autumn, and narcissus in December. The cosmos season, when tens of thousands of blooms fill the grounds, draws the largest crowds.

The temple sits in the Naraza district north of the old city. From JR Nara or Kintetsu Nara station, a Nara Kotsu bus bound for Aoyama Jutaku or Kunimidai reaches the Hannya-ji stop in about twelve minutes, and the gate is a short walk from there. Opening hours are generally 9:00 to 17:00, with last entry at 16:30, though several winter and summer months close an hour earlier. Admission is 500 yen for adults, rising to around 700 yen during the peak flower seasons. The Nara National Museum is a few minutes away by car, and Kitayama Jūhakkenko, a rare surviving medieval care home for the sick that is now a national historic site, lies close by.