Tamamushi Zushi

The Tamamushi Shrine: A Beetle-Winged Hall in Miniature

Beneath a lacework of pierced gilt-bronze fittings on a black-lacquered miniature hall at Hōryū-ji, the wing-cases of thousands of jewel beetles once flashed metallic green and gold. The object is the Tamamushi Shrine (Tamamushi no Zushi), a portable Buddhist reliquary cabinet from the Asuka period, the seventh century. Its name comes directly from those beetle wings: tamamushi is the Japanese jewel beetle, whose iridescent elytra were laid in rows behind the openwork metal so that the shimmer would show through the cut-out patterns.

A zushi is a roofed container made to hold an object of worship, such as a statue, a painting, or relics. What sets this one apart is its shape. Rather than a plain box, it reproduces an entire Buddhist hall set on a tall pedestal. The piece stands 233 centimeters in the Agency for Cultural Affairs record, though several catalogues and reference works give the figure as 226.6 centimeters; in either case it rises a little over two meters.

The structure reads from the bottom up in three parts. Low pedestal feet support a tall pedestal known as a shumiza, the symbolic Mount Sumeru of Buddhist cosmology. Above that sits the kūden, an old word for the cabinet itself, built in the form of a small temple hall. The body is finished in black lacquer, and the slender members, the pillars, beams, and frames, carry pierced gilt-bronze plates worked in vine scrolls. It is under these plates that the beetle wings were set.

Why It Is a National Treasure

The Tamamushi Shrine was designated a National Treasure under the postwar law on June 9, 1951. It had already been listed as a National Treasure under the older system on December 28, 1897, which places it among the very first objects Japan singled out for protection. It is registered in the crafts category, yet its importance reaches across several disciplines at once.

The reason lies in what the Asuka craftsmen folded into a single object: architecture, woodwork, metalwork, lacquer, and painting, each handled at a high level and fused into one design. The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes it as the most outstanding surviving example of this combined craft from the period.

Its value as an architectural document is unusual. Almost no wooden architecture from the seventh century survives anywhere in Japan apart from the Hōryū-ji halls themselves, so historians often have only excavated foundations to work from. The cabinet's hall preserves features that have otherwise vanished. The roof uses shikorobuki, a stepped form considered the ancestor of the later hip-and-gable roof, and the eaves rest on cloud-shaped bracket arms called kumohijiki. Ridge-end ornaments called shibi crown the roof; the original ones were lost and replaced in more recent centuries, but the cabinet is sometimes cited as the earliest Japanese example of the form.

The paintings carry their own claim. On the pedestal, the scenes from the Buddha's past lives are read as the oldest narrative pictures in Japan. They use a technique scholars call continuous narrative, where several moments of one story appear within a single frame, so the eye follows the action through the picture rather than across separate panels.

What to Look For

Start at the four faces of the pedestal, where the painting is best preserved. The work was done in colored lacquer together with mitsudae, an early oil-based technique, using vermilion, yellow, and green over the dark ground.

The right side holds the most famous image, the Jataka of the hungry tigress. A prince named Mahāsattva, a former life of the Buddha, comes upon a starving tigress with seven cubs. He climbs a cliff, throws himself down, and offers his own body so that the animals may live. The painter shows him three times in one scene, removing his robe at the top, falling through the air, and lying among the tigers below, with a screen of bamboo set in front so the most violent moment is half hidden.

The left side tells a parallel story of self-sacrifice, the youth of the Himalayas who agrees to give his body to a demon in exchange for hearing the second half of a sacred verse on impermanence. The front face shows an offering before a relic, and the rear face shows the Mount Sumeru world, the cosmic mountain at the center of the Buddhist universe. (The Agency for Cultural Affairs records the rear painting as a jeweled pagoda; some museum descriptions read it instead as a realm of immortals, and the reading is debated.)

The beetle wings themselves are the hardest thing to see today. Most have been lost over thirteen centuries, and only traces remain behind the surviving metalwork, so the green fire that gave the shrine its name now takes some imagination to picture. Look instead at the interior of the upper hall, where rows of small Buddha figures were beaten out of gilt-bronze and fixed to the walls. The original main image was a triad of Buddhist figures; it was stolen in the thirteenth century, and a gilt-bronze Kannon stands inside in its place.

Around Hōryū-ji

The Tamamushi Shrine is kept in the Daihōzōin, the Gallery of Temple Treasures, which opened in 1998 in the eastern precinct of Hōryū-ji. The gallery was built to bring many of the temple's portable masterworks under one roof, so a single visit places the cabinet among other first-rank pieces.

A few steps away stand the slender Kudara Kannon, one of the most admired sculptures in Japan, and the boyish Yumechigai Kannon, said to turn bad dreams into good ones. The shrine associated with Lady Tachibana, with its Amida triad rising from a lotus pond, sits in the same hall. Hōryū-ji itself is in Ikaruga, a short trip west of Nara city, and the temple grounds hold the world's oldest surviving wooden buildings, so the cabinet's miniature hall can be compared directly with full-scale architecture of nearly the same age.