Staff

A Bronze Staff That Once Had a Voice

At Jōraku-ji, a Tendai temple in the western hills of Konan in Shiga Prefecture, the monks keep a small cast-bronze object that long ago announced a traveler's approach with a ring of metal on metal. It is a shakujō, the ringed staff of Buddhist practice, and it has held the rank of Important Cultural Property since 1911.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs lists it plainly as a work of the Heian period. Studied for its form and casting, it is usually assigned to the later Heian, somewhere in the eleventh or twelfth century, a reading supported by details that drop out of such staffs not long afterward.

What survives is the head. The loop of bronze is worked into the elongated, quince-like outline the Japanese call mokkō. Flying clouds and a small pagoda ride its outer rim, while inside the loop a cloud pattern doubles back on itself, the left side mirroring the right. A cloud-shaped seat crowns the shaft, and on it stands a miniature pagoda, with a small water vessel set at the very top. The loose rings that once hung at either side, the parts that gave the staff its sound, are lost.

Why a Walking Stick Became a Treasure

A shakujō takes its name from the noise it makes. Struck against the ground, the metal rings clatter in a dry shaku-shaku that carries through forest and along a village lane. Monks walking mountain trails used that sound to clear snakes and insects from the path ahead. Standing at a doorway during their alms rounds, they shook it rather than call out. The old and the ailing leaned on it as a staff. One object, three uses, every one of them practical.

Most staffs that come down to us are plain. This one is not. The choice to mount a pagoda and a water vessel on a working tool, to fill its loop with cloud and shrine, pushes it toward the territory of a devotional image. That impulse belongs to a narrow span of years. After the late Heian, shakujō carrying this kind of figural ornament effectively cease to appear, and it is partly on these grounds that specialists read the Jōraku-ji staff as late-Heian work and count it among the better pieces of its time.

When the young Meiji government began listing the art it meant to protect, the staff was entered as an Important Cultural Property on the seventeenth of April, 1911, the forty-fourth year of the Meiji era. The early date is itself telling: this was among the first generations of objects the nation chose to safeguard.

A Founder's Staff, by Tradition

The temple tells a longer story. By its own account the staff belonged to Rōben, the eighth-century monk credited with founding Jōraku-ji at the wish of Empress Genmei. The connection is best held lightly. Rōben lived roughly three centuries before the bronze was likely cast, so the tie is one of reverence rather than record. What the tradition does preserve is the temple's sense of itself as an ancient house, a memory older than any of the objects that now carry its name.

A practical note for anyone drawn by the staff itself: it is a stored treasure, not a fixture on permanent view. The things most reliably encountered at Jōraku-ji are its two National Treasures, the main hall and the three-storied pagoda, together with the statues kept inside the hall. Visitors hoping to see the shakujō in person should contact the temple ahead of time to confirm it will be on display.

The Temple and Its Neighbors

Jōraku-ji is the western member of the Konan Sanzan, a set of three Tendai temples spread across the southern rim of the Lake Biwa basin. It is known locally as Nishidera, the western temple, to set it apart from its companions Chōju-ji and Zensui-ji, both a short drive off. Many travelers take in all three in a single day. People here keep the names straight with a small phrase that strings them into a wish for good water, steady cheer, and a long life.

The main hall, rebuilt in 1360 after a fire, and the pagoda, raised around the year 1400, both rose in the centuries that followed the staff's casting. Each is a National Treasure of timber, tile, and cypress bark. A path loops around the hillside behind them, and across the second half of November the maples turn the slope red. That is the one stretch of the year when the temple opens its gate without the reservation it otherwise asks for.

One part of the old temple left the grounds for good. The medieval gate that once stood here was carried off to Fushimi Castle, then on to Mii-dera at the foot of the same lake, where it serves to this day as that temple's great gate.