A meizanologist's diary (35)

10 November: a reverent hush pervades the exhibition hall, crowded though it is. This is not a mountain day. We’re at the Nara National Museum, paying our annual homage to the treasures of the Shōsō-in, a time capsule sent down from the eighth-century Imperial court. This year’s iteration includes some of the collection’s finest pieces, to mark the first year of the new Reiwa era.

Among the bronze mirrors and the exquisitely inlaid casks, Item 20 looks oddly out of place. It is a battered relic of weathered wooden layers that looks for all the world like a stand for some upmarket bonsai tree. “Remaining part of a mountain-shaped object,” the catalogue tells us. Straining our eyes through the gloom, we descry a miniature grove of blackened and crinkled trees – wrought of silver says the catalogue, complete with cloth scraps for leaves.

Many of the Shōsō-in’s treasures recall a known person, and even a specific occasion. The golden pendants we’ve just seen, for example, once adorned the crowns worn by Emperor Shōmu and Empress Kōmyō on that very spring day in Tempyō Shōhō 4 (752) when the Great Buddha of the Tōdaiji was inaugurated.

The eye-opening ceremony for the Great Buddha of the Todaiji
Painting by Hirayama Ikuo

The mountain-shaped object is different. Nobody knows how it came to be in the Shōsō-in, or why. As good scholars should be, the catalogue authors are circumspect: “While it is not known how this was used, it probably served as a decorative object during a Buddhist ritual or some other kind of ceremony.”

Casting a last glance at the enigmatic mountain, we move on to an eight-lobed table and a set of gilt bronze windbells. These objects breathe the elegance and refinement of the High Tempyō. But I’m thinking that, somewhere in the Emperor’s entourage, amid this world of symmetry and grace, there was somebody for whom the wild, uncouth form of mountains had a special meaning.