Relic Container

A reliquary that crossed the sea

Inside the gilt-bronze body of a pagoda barely a meter tall sits a thick glass jar of pale, almost honeyed yellow, about eleven centimeters across at its widest. The jar holds grains of relic so small that the national record notes a single dark speck on each. These are the relics, venerated as relics of the Buddha, that the Chinese priest Ganjin (Jianzhen, 688–763) is said to have carried to Japan, and they are the reason Tōshōdai-ji in Nara exists at all.

Tōshōdai-ji groups three objects under a single National Treasure designation called simply the reliquary, or sharaiyōki. They are the glass jar that holds the relics, a woven silk net that once wrapped it, and the gilt-bronze stupa shaped around a tortoise that was built to enshrine them. Each came from a different place and a different century, yet they have travelled together as one sacred set for more than a thousand years.

Three vessels, three origins

The glass jar

The innermost vessel is a turnip-shaped jar of pale yellow glass, about 11.2 centimeters across the body and roughly nine centimeters tall, with strong angular shoulders and a long tubular neck. The glass is thick, and large bubbles are trapped near the shoulder and base. A gilt-bronze collar rings the mouth, which has been sealed shut and resealed many times. The temple records the jar as Tang Chinese work of the eighth century while describing the glass itself as Persian in make, a vessel that would have crossed much of Asia before reaching a Tang port and a ship bound for Japan. The relics within show only as minute grains.

The colored-thread flower net

Wrapping the jar was a lace-like net of colored silk, worked in navy, brown-green, pale brown and white-brown threads outward from a square motif at its center, with a band of open lozenges around the rim. It measured close to twenty-eight centimeters at its widest. Specialists regard it as Tang work of the eighth century and the oldest surviving net of its kind. Today only part of the outer ring remains.

The golden-tortoise stupa

The outer container is a reliquary stupa about ninety-three centimeters tall, the temple gives roughly ninety-two, built of hammered gilt-bronze. A tortoise forms its base, its body a wooden core sheathed in gilt-bronze plate, legs braced and neck stretched high beneath a pair of small horns. Across the shell runs a pattern of flowers and hexagons over a ground of tiny ring-punches. A lotus seat rises from the tortoise's back, and above it stands the pagoda: its lower story cut as openwork arabesque, a miniature canopy and strings of beads hung within, its roof modeled on formal tile roofing down to the small demon tiles at the ridge ends. The glass jar rests inside.

Why it is a National Treasure

The set was designated an Important Cultural Property in 1959 and raised to National Treasure in 1961. What the designation honors is not one object but the meeting of them. An eighth-century glass jar and silk net carried from the continent sit within metalwork made in Japan centuries later, and the three have been kept and resealed as a single sacred unit. The net alone would matter as the earliest known example of its type. Together the vessels hold the founding story of the temple in physical form.

Their history is unusually well documented. Medieval temple records such as the Shichidaiji nikki (1106) and the Shichidaiji junrei shiki (1140) describe relics held at Tōshōdai-ji, and the jar bears the sealed signatures of later rulers. The designation lists, among its attached items, the kaō seals of Emperor Go-Daigo and the shoguns Ashikaga Yoshimitsu and Yoshinori; the temple counts Emperor Go-Komatsu among those who sealed the jar as well. Each seal marks a moment when someone in power opened, venerated and closed the vessel again.

The tortoise that rose from the sea

The tortoise base is not decorative whimsy. Ganjin's crossing from China was famously disastrous: several attempts failed over more than a decade, and by the time he reached Japan in 753 he had lost his sight. One tradition holds that during the voyage the relics slipped into the sea, and a golden tortoise rose with them on its back and carried them to safety. The stupa gives that story a shape, setting the relics on the very creature said to have saved them.

When the metalwork was made is less settled. The national database assigns it to the Kamakura period, the temple to the fourteenth century, and an old account credits a reliquary stupa built when Minamoto no Yoritomo restored the relic hall. The archaic cut of the tortoise and of the lotus that cradles the jar argues for an early date. Rather than force a single answer, the record keeps the possibilities open, which suits an object assembled from pieces of different ages.

Where to see it, and when

For most of the year the reliquary stays out of sight. It is enshrined in the Korō, the small two-story tower that stands east of the Golden Hall and is now called the relic hall, or Shariden. The tower is itself a National Treasure of 1240, and its interior is closed. The vessels come out once a year, during the Shaka Nenbutsu-e held on October 21 to 23. The rite, begun by the priest Jōkei in the Kamakura period and kept up for some eight centuries, takes place in the Raidō hall just beside the tower. After the midday services on the 21st and 22nd the stupa is brought to the hall's edge, its many wrapping cloths loosened, and visitors can look closely at the openwork pagoda and the glass jar inside it.

Outside that window there is still a great deal to see. The eighth-century Golden Hall holds monumental dry-lacquer statues, the Lecture Hall was moved from the old Nara palace, and the seated portrait of Ganjin in the Founder's Hall is shown for a few days in early June. The New Treasure House displays sculpture and architectural fragments year round. Tōshōdai-ji sits about ten minutes on foot from Nishinokyō Station and forms part of the Historic Monuments of Ancient Nara, a World Heritage site.