Stone Pagoda and Stone Buddha Statues at the Abandoned

A Granite Pagoda Carved with the Date 1241

A two-storied pagoda of pale granite rises from a bamboo grove on the eastern foot of Mount Bodaiji, in the city of Konan in southern Shiga Prefecture. It stands about 4.48 meters tall. Around its lower body runs a twenty-character inscription that records the seventh month of Ninji 2, the year 1241, together with the names of the monk who commissioned it, Ryōzen, and the lay patron, a woman of the Hioki family.

Stone pagodas of this form are uncommon in Japan. One whose construction date can be read directly from the stone is rarer still.

The pagoda does not stand alone. It belongs to the grounds of a temple that no longer exists. The whole area, with its pagoda and a group of carved stone Buddhas, is protected as a National Historic Site under the name Hai-Shōbodai-ji Seki-tahōtō oyobi Sekibutsu, the Stone Tahōtō and Stone Buddhas of the Former Shōbodai-ji.

The Temple That Once Covered This Hillside

Local tradition credits the founding of Shōbodai-ji to the monk Rōben, the same figure associated with the great Nara temple of Tōdai-ji, and places it in the year 731. The temple's name carries a comparison built into it. Across the Yasu River stood Konshō-ji, known as Dai-Bodai-ji, the "Greater Bodai-ji." The temple here was the Shō-Bodai-ji, the "Lesser" one, though the pairing speaks more to a relationship between two houses than to any difference in scale.

A picture map copied in 1492 and kept by a nearby temple shows what Shōbodai-ji looked like before its end. The drawing lays out a pagoda, a golden hall, a lecture hall, a bell tower, a sutra repository, monks' quarters and a refectory, surrounded by thirty-seven sub-temple lodges. This was a full monastic complex spread across the slope.

Its end came in 1570. During the wars between Oda Nobunaga and the Rokkaku clan, soldiers of the defeated Rokkaku side set fire to the mountain, and the temple buildings burned. A common retelling blames Nobunaga's own army; the fire is more accurately attributed to the retreating Rokkaku soldiers. Shōbodai-ji was never rebuilt. What survived was made of stone.

A Site Protected Since 1926

The grounds were designated a National Historic Site on 20 October 1926, and the protected area was expanded on 21 February 1928. The designation falls under the criterion covering the ruins of temples and shrines and other places connected to religious belief. The stone pagoda is, in addition, designated an Important Cultural Property in its own right.

Two things give the site its value for historians. The first is the inscription on the pagoda. Most surviving pagodas of the tahōtō type are wooden buildings, and dating them often rests on style alone. A stone example with its year of construction cut into the surface offers a fixed point against which other, undated works can be measured.

The second is what the place preserves about a temple that otherwise left almost nothing behind. The carved stones are, in effect, the temple's surviving record.

The Stone Pagoda Up Close

The tahōtō is a form particular to Japanese Buddhist architecture: a two-storied pagoda with a square lower story and a rounded upper one, linked to the esoteric Shingon and Tendai schools and to Tahō Nyorai, the buddha who appears within a jewelled pagoda in the eleventh chapter of the Lotus Sutra. Most examples are timber buildings. To see the form rendered in granite, at a height approaching four and a half meters, is to see it translated into a material meant to outlast wood.

The climb to the pagoda is short. From the path it sits a little above eye level, framed by bamboo, and the carving rewards an unhurried look. The twenty characters of the inscription are worth seeking out. They name the people behind the work and set it firmly within the Kamakura period, a time when stone carving in this part of Ōmi province was reaching a high level of skill.

The Jizō Trio and the Enma Stone

At the entrance to the mountain path stand three stone images of Jizō, the bodhisattva who watches over travelers and the dead. Each is close to life size, the central figure measuring about 158 centimeters. Look closely and the three turn out not to be of one moment. The central image is the oldest, carved in the later Kamakura period; its face and the flow of its robe folds differ from those of the images beside it. The two flanking figures were added in the early Muromachi period and shaped to attend the older one, in the manner of acolytes placed around a central deity.

A short distance away is a stranger work. On a granite slab shaped roughly like a shōgi piece, five figures are carved in shallow relief. At the center, set within a recessed panel, is Enma, the king who judges the dead. Around him are Amida Nyorai, two further Jizō, and a figure in monk's dress.

The stone is broken on one side and joined back together, the repair dating to the late Edo period. The grouping carries a plain hope: that the judged soul, through the mercy of Jizō, would escape the hells and be drawn instead toward the Pure Land.

Visiting the Site

The site lies in the Bodaiji district of Konan, about 1.2 kilometers north of Ishibe Station on the JR Kusatsu Line. By car it is roughly ten minutes from Ishibe Station or fifteen from Kōsei Station, and a local community bus also serves the area. The stones stand outdoors and can be seen at any time of year, with no admission fee and no fixed opening hours. Allow around twenty minutes to look properly at the pagoda and the carvings. The ground is uneven in places, so sensible footwear helps.

In one corner of the old precinct stands Bodai-zen-ji, a Zen temple of the Ōbaku school founded in 1723, long after Shōbodai-ji had gone. Its principal image, a standing Amida Nyorai of the Fujiwara period and an Important Cultural Property, is thought to be a buddha image that came down from the older temple.

For visitors willing to walk, the path up Mount Bodaiji opens onto a wide view. Mount Mikami, the cone-shaped peak known as Ōmi-Fuji, stands close ahead, with Lake Biwa beyond.