Thirteen-Story Pagoda of Hannya-Ji Temple

A Granite Tower Raised in 1253

The Thirteen-Story Stone Pagoda of Hannya-ji (般若寺十三重塔, Hannyaji Jūsanjū-no-tō), in Hannyaji-chō in the northern part of Nara City, Nara Prefecture, was completed in the fifth year of the Kenchō era (1253) and designated an Important Cultural Property on 17 April 1902. It belongs to Hannya-ji (般若寺, also written Hannyaji), a temple of the Shingon Ritsu school better known locally as the Cosmos Temple.

The material is granite. The height is about 14.2 metres by the figure the Nara City Tourist Association and the temple use, though 12.6 metres appears in some accounts, and the Agency for Cultural Affairs record gives no measurement at all.

Thirteen roof stones sit one above another over a squat core, each slightly narrower than the one below. The reduction is not even. Lower tiers shrink slowly, upper ones quickly, so that seen from close to the base the tower reads almost as a column, while from the steps of the main hall the profile opens into a long shallow curve. That difference between the near view and the far view is deliberate, and it is the first thing to test on arrival.

Most of the carving sits on the first tier. Each face of the core stone holds a seated Buddha cut in shallow line relief, cross-legged on a lotus pedestal, with a double circular halo behind head and shoulders: Yakushi, the Buddha of medicine, on the east; Shaka on the south; Amida on the west; and Miroku, who is to appear in a distant future age, on the north. Japanese scholarship calls this arrangement kenkyō shihōbutsu, the four directional figures of the exoteric teachings. The corners of the stone are chamfered, which leaves each figure a clean rectangular field and keeps the incised lines legible from several metres away.

Two further pieces come under the same designation as attached items, or tsuketari: an old stone finial and an old bronze finial, one of each. Both were carried by the tower at earlier stages of its repair history.

The Mason Who Came from Song China

In 1180 the forces of Taira no Shigehira burned the great temples of Nara, and Hannya-ji went down with Tōdai-ji and Kōfuku-ji. For decades afterwards the site was little more than foundation stones.

Rebuilding Tōdai-ji drew craftsmen across the sea. Among them was I Gyōmatsu (伊行末, also read I no Yukisue, died 1260), a stonemason born near Mingzhou in Southern Song China, who reached Japan early in the Kamakura period and worked on the stone platform of the Great Buddha Hall and on the stonework of its surrounding corridors. He stayed, trained pupils, and founded the lineage of masons known as the I school (伊派), whose descendants took surnames written with the characters I, Ino and Ii and left work across the country.

The attribution of the Hannya-ji tower to that workshop rests on a document cut in stone. In 1261, on the first anniversary of his father's death, I Gyōmatsu's eldest son I Gyōkichi (伊行吉, I no Yukiyoshi) set up a pair of kasa-tōba, tall slab-like stone tablets each capped with its own roof stone, one dedicated to the repose of his late father and one to his mother's continued health. Their inscriptions record the family's activity, and it is on that evidence that the pagoda is accepted as the work of I Gyōmatsu and his group. The tablets stand in the precinct today, protected as Important Cultural Properties in the archaeological materials category; they were broken up during the anti-Buddhist disturbances of the early Meiji period and re-erected on their present site in 1892.

The fundraising campaign that paid for the tower is credited to a monk called Ryōe (良恵), known by the name Kanryōbō. Work was finished by about 1253. Soon afterwards Eison (叡尊, 1201–1290) of Saidai-ji, the reviver of the Shingon Ritsu school, took charge of restoring the temple's halls and images, and turned Hannya-ji into a base for relief work among the sick and destitute who lived on this northern edge of the old capital. The Kitayama Jūhakkendo, a lodging house for people with Hansen's disease and now a National Historic Site, stands a short way down the same road.

What makes the tower worth the designation is this crossing of techniques. Song masons brought a way of handling stone that Japanese carpenters had no equivalent for, and applied it to hard local granite in a form, the multi-tiered stone pagoda, that Japanese patrons already understood. Hannya-ji is where that meeting is easiest to read at full scale.

What the Tower Was Holding

In February 1964 the pagoda was taken apart stone by stone for a full dismantling repair that ran for roughly a year. The work uncovered a set of deposits that had been sealed inside since the thirteenth century.

A square cavity in the upper surface of the first-tier core stone yielded a gilt-bronze reliquary pagoda together with five-element stupas in gilt bronze and in rock crystal. The fourth tier held a wooden box containing a Song-printed Lotus Sutra in small characters; an ink inscription on the box carries a cyclical date read as corresponding to 1253, and that inscription is the anchor for the construction year now given in every reference. A small gilt-bronze standing Amida of the seventh or eighth century, roughly 40 centimetres tall and already several hundred years old when it went into the tower, came out as well. The finds are protected together as a separate Important Cultural Property under the name Yamato Hannya-ji Sekizō Jūsanjūtō-nai Nōchihin.

None of it is on permanent display. The Amida and the other deposits are shown only during limited special openings, usually timed to the autumn flowering season, and a separate admission applies on top of the standard fee.

The precinct itself is open daily, generally 9:00 to 17:00 with last admission at 16:30 and a shortened schedule in the coldest and hottest months. Admission runs 500 yen for adults, 200 yen for junior and senior high school students and 100 yen for elementary school pupils, with higher rates during the flower seasons. Photography in the open grounds is normally permitted, and the pagoda is by some distance the most photographed object at Hannya-ji, particularly in autumn when around 150,000 cosmos plants come into bloom around its base and the stone Kannon figures ranged along the paths. Buses from JR Nara and Kintetsu Nara stations reach the Hannyaji stop in about twelve minutes, and the entrance is three to five minutes' walk from there.

Two things reward a slower look. One is the National Treasure rōmon, the two-storey gate of about 1264 to 1274 that faces the old Kyō-kaidō highway and is the oldest surviving Japanese gate of its type. The other is the small gabled sutra repository standing immediately behind the pagoda, an Important Cultural Property in its own right and easy to walk straight past.

Hours, fees and the dates of special openings change from year to year. Confirm them on the temple's own site before travelling.