Fire-gilt bronze; base with wooden core. Comprised of many parts and dismountable into four main components. The miniature pagoda that housed a Buddha relic rises to the centre from a two-tiered, square base on four curved feet. Four stairs lead from the lower tier to the terrace on the upper tier, the terraces to both tiers furnished with balustrades. The lower storey has a square ground plan with four double doors, all of which can be opened. It is rounded to the upper edges. The low, drum-shaped upper storey also has four double doors and a balustrade. Above it rises a three-tiered console structure, comprised of many individual parts and a pyramid-shaped, curved roof. The wooden roof structure of the building itself is thus copied in great detail; the burnished roof is similar in terms of form and colour to a real tiled roof. To the apex is a shaft finial (sôrin) with nine rings, surmounted by a flaming jewel. Two of the original four wind bells (fûtaku) still hang down from the tip of the shaft finial, a further four ornamenting the corners of the roof. Almost all of the surfaces of the reliquary are decorated with a variety of detailed, chased patterns. Beside the stairs leading to the upper terrace, there are eight curving cartouches with lions in relief. To the base of the lower storey there is an inscription engraved on an shallow hexagonal pedestal with eight small holes to the corners, which reads, “Genroku jûichi sai tsuchinoe tora rokugatsu hi sharitô shi Miyajima Hanjirô Fujiwara Seiji kore o saku Rakuyô jû.” (Made by the Master of pagoda reliquaries, Miyajima Hanjirô Fujiwara Seiji from Rakuyô (Kyôto), in the 11th year of the Genroku era with the cyclical characters, tsuchinoe tora (1698), on a day in the 6th month).

The missing inner reliquary containing the relic must have once been located in the lower storey and was probably secured to the eight holes. It may well have been made of glass, rock crystal or metal, as surviving examples testify.

Traces of wear; traces of corrosion, a few insignificant losses. Height: 81.5 cm, base area: 37 cm². (BA) 

Provenance:
from a Swiss private collection, acquired 1998 on the Swiss art market

Within the Buddhist context, reliquaries (Jap. shari) generally housed the mortal remains of the historic Buddha Shakyamuni. Upon his death in the 5th or 4th cent. BCE, his ashes and bone remains were divided between the rulers of eight kingdoms in northern India, who had them interred in stûpa, semi-circular funerary monuments, erected for the purpose. This was the start of the veneration of reliquaries, closely associated with Buddhism, which was disseminated, in conjunction with Buddhist teachings, throughout Central Asia and China and onwards to Japan, being mentioned there for the first time in AD 585. The tower-like pagoda took over the function of the stûpa in East Asia. The reliquaries housing the relics were generally sunk into the base stone of the central column, where they would become the ritual centre of the temple. From the Heian period (AD 794-1185) onwards, reliquaries in the form of pagodas (sharitô) were also placed on display in the main rooms of the temple, allowing believers to venerate them. Most of the sharitô that survive today date from the Heian or Kamakura periods (1185-1333). Aside from very abstract reliquary forms, there exist models of real wooden pagodas more or less true to the original architecture, generally in gilt-bronze, such as the pagoda reliquary on the back of a turtle (National Treasure) in Tôshôdaiji in Nara, dating from the 12th cent., height 92 cm, which is very similar to this reliquary, in terms of the upper tier, roof, roof structure and shaft finial, its lower storey being cylindrical in form, however, as in most sharitô of this type. In this case, it is in pierce work, without doors and terraces (see Busshari to hôju. Shaka o shitau kokoro/Ultimate Sanctuaries: The Aesthetics of Buddhist Relic Worship, (exhibition catalogue), Nara Kokuritsu Hakubutsukan/Nara National Museum 2001, cat. no. 35 and other examples from the 12th and 13th cents, some of which have terrace-shaped bases without complex roof structures, ibid., cat. nos 47, 48, 52 and 53. 

Very few of the ‘models’ dating from the Edo period appear to have survived. Amongst them is a copy of the Tôshôdaiji reliquary, dated 1842, in the Hasedera (see ibid., cat. no. 38) and a pagoda reliquary from Okadera (Nara Prefecture), which is dated to the 16th/17th cents, and is only 34.5 cm in height, without an upper tier and a complex roof structure, its pagoda standing on a lotus flower above a stepped base (see Okadera no rekishi to bijutsu/The History and Art of Okadera, (exhibition catalogue), Nara National Museum 2002, cat. no. 26).