Buddhist Bells and Dragons - by Sherry D Fowler (Hardcover)

About the Book

"Buddhist Bells and Dragons: Under and Over Water, In and Out of Japan recovers the essential but unrecognized roles of Buddhist temple bells in the history of art, religious studies, and the history of interregional and international relations with Japan. Specifically attending to the agency of bronze bells made as early as the seventh century, the chapters address how bells function as significant commodities of material and emotional exchange. Abundant Japanese stories and illustrations of Buddhist bells being transported across the sea or sunk in bodies of water are shared to illuminate why the relationship between dragons, bells, and water is so pervasive in Japanese culture. Utilizing object biography, the book analyzes stories of the lives of key bells from multiple perspectives that extend long past any human lifetime. The most famous is the eighth-century bell from Miidera temple, known for its mythical resurfacing from the Dragon King's undersea palace and its legendary relationship to Benkei, a real twelfth-century warrior conflated into the thirteenth-century historical event of the Miidera bell's theft and return. Important bells from Korea, China, and Ryukyu (Okinawa) that had contact with Japan are also treated to offer fresh explanations of the pivotal roles bells held in the wider history of international maritime exchange, in both trade and plunder, that reach far beyond a single nation's narrative. As the first of its kind, this book will open minds to the significance of the art, history, emotion, and religious devotion surrounding bells in Japan as they align with dragons and water. Buddhist Bells and Dragons expands the notions of East Asian religious art by demonstrating the vital history of bells for an audience of scholars and students of not only Buddhist studies, but also art history, religious studies, East Asian studies, and international political history. The final chapter, on the seizure and return of Japanese Buddhist bells during and after the Asia-Pacific War (1937-1945), brings the subject to the near present. All told, the vibrant culture behind Japan's bronze temple bells, long hidden in plain sight, is revealed"--

Book Synopsis

Buddhist Bells and Dragons: Under and Over Water, In and Out of Japan recovers the essential but unrecognized roles of Buddhist temple bells in the history of art, religious studies, and the history of interregional and international relations with Japan. Specifically attending to the agency of bronze bells made as early as the seventh century, the chapters address how bells function as significant commodities of material and emotional exchange.

Abundant Japanese stories and illustrations of Buddhist bells being transported across the sea or sunk in bodies of water are shared to illuminate why the relationship between dragons, bells, and water is so pervasive in Japanese culture. Utilizing object biography, the book analyzes stories of the lives of key bells from multiple perspectives that extend long past any human lifetime. The most famous is the eighth-century bell from Miidera temple, known for its mythical resurfacing from the Dragon King's undersea palace and its legendary relationship to Benkei, a real twelfth-century warrior conflated into the thirteenth-century historical event of the Miidera bell's theft and return. Important bells from Korea, China, and Ryukyu (Okinawa) that had contact with Japan are also treated to offer fresh explanations of the pivotal roles bells held in the wider history of international maritime exchange, in both trade and plunder, that reach far beyond a single nation's narrative. As the first of its kind, this book will open minds to the significance of the art, history, emotion, and religious devotion surrounding bells in Japan as they align with dragons and water.

Buddhist Bells and Dragons expands the notions of East Asian religious art by demonstrating the vital history of bells for an audience of scholars and students of not only Buddhist studies, but also art history, religious studies, East Asian studies, and international political history. The final chapter, on the seizure and return of Japanese Buddhist bells during and after the Asia-Pacific War (1937-1945), brings the subject to the near present. All told, the vibrant culture behind Japan's bronze temple bells, long hidden in plain sight, is revealed.

Review Quotes

Painstakingly researched yet accessible, the book is a significant contribution to Japanese Buddhist art history and an unexpectedly captivating read with its tales of dragons, treasure, and pirates. . . . Fowler shows how overlapping stories of transformation, loss, and renewal expanded the meaning of bells beyond their ritual sound, embedding them in Japan's imagination and landscape. Even more fascinating, perhaps, than the many legends of the mythical appearance and movement of bells are the actual stories of bells traveling "under and over water, in and out of Japan." For centuries, bells crossed the seas as part of cultural and mercantile exchange between Japan and its closest neighbors, Korea and Ryukyu. . . . [T]he breadth of Fowler's impressive study--rich with detail on artistry, literature, religion, local and regional history, politics, and diplomacy--opened my eyes to a fascinating aspect of Japanese spiritual culture of which I had been only dimly aware.-- "Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, Spring 2026"

In this major art historical and religious study, Sherry Fowler not only fills an important lacuna in the field, but also uses the long-overlooked subject matter of Buddhist bells in Japan to reorient scholarly attention toward some of the most vital and exciting issues and approaches in the study of Japanese visual, material, and religious culture today: materiality, history of the senses, object agency, object biography, ritual enlivenment, memory and loss, and interregional exchange, to name but a few.--D. Max Moerman, author of The Japanese Buddhist World Map: Religious Vision and the Cartographic Imagination

Sherry Fowler has succeeded in putting bells on the map. Hers will be the 'bell book' for a generation, and that is a considerable achievement. There is nothing quite like it.--Yukio Lippit, author of Painting of the Realm: The Kano House of Painters in Seventeenth-Century Japan

About the Author

Sherry D. Fowler is professor of Japanese art history at the University of Kansas.