A meizanologist’s diary (80)

4 November, Nara: the rutting deer may bite, butt, kick or knock you down, or so the signs warn. Lolling in the balmy sunshine, though, the animals look more chilled than most of the tourists.

We’ll need to channel their composure as the queue for the annual Shōsō-in exhibition seems to wrap around the length and breadth of the Nara National Museum. Once inside the exhibition hall, we find it more crowded than we remembered it from previous visits, just like yesterday’s summit.

But, heck, we’re not complaining: it’s only since 1946 that the Imperial Household Agency has allowed commoners like us to gaze and gawp at these exquisite voyagers through time from the palace and temples of the eighth century Tempyō era.

Someone once said that, if you took in twelve Shōsō-in exhibitions, you would see most of what the collection has to offer. Yet each new exhibition somehow confounds that notion, which shouldn’t be surprising, given that the curators have 9,000 items or so to choose from. So, as with yesterday’s white centipedes, there is always something new to see.

True, that screen panel, the one with two deer under a tree, must have been exhibited several times over the years - most recently in 2013, says the catalogue - but it’s well worth another look. It reads like a message from the Empress Kōmyō (701–760) herself. She donated it along with several hundred other items to the Tōdaiji temple after the death of the Emperor in 756 because, as she wrote then, “these objects remind me of the bygone days, and the sight of them causes me bitter grief.” Yet her two deer look out at us serenely, as chilled as their modern counterparts outside.

Gigaku mask of drunken retainer
Image courtesy of Imperial Household Agency

No less famous are the gigaku masks, the silver mirror and the miraculously well-preserved zithern, as Arthur Waley would have called it. These objects recall a court that lived a life of such breathtaking refinement that the outside world almost fades into invisibility.

Zithern from Silla
Image courtesy of Imperial Household Agency

But what is this? Item 23 purports to be a “Three-pronged performance spearhead,” or in other words a ritual sceptre known as a sankosho. ‘Performance’ refers to the fact that this one is made of wood, and thus lighter to heft during temple rituals than a bronze original.

Symbolising a thunderbolt, this sankosho points to the existence of realms altogether wilder than any the courtiers knew. It was a legendary sankosho, presumably of bronze, that helped to find the site of Japan’s most famous mountain temple. When Kōbō Daishi went to China, his ship all but foundered in a storm. Praying for deliverance, the Daishi vowed he would dedicate a new temple to the Kannon if he survived.

On returning to Japan, he threw his sankosho into the air - one can imagine him launching it as one would a small drone - and found that it had landed in Tamba Province, to the north of Kyoto. And when he came to that region, a white deer showed him the way to a valley where he found his ritual sceptre hanging in a tree. After that, the sankosho took off again, this time in the direction of Mt Koya, still the most famous mountain sanctuary in all Japan …

Back in the open air, the Sensei so far forgets herself as to go up to a recumbent deer and pat it on the head. Like all the others in the park, the animal accepts this obeisance without any sign of irritation or even acknowledgement. These deer, they are surely as chilled as the ones in Empress Kōmyō’s screen panel.