Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 7.djvu/124

RV 100 notes seem to have been born amid the eternal restfulness of the Buddhist paradise, and to have gathered, on their way to human ears, echoes of the sadness that prepares the soul for Nirvana. Some of them are giants among bells. The Sanjusangen-do in Kyōtō, where stand the 33,333 images of the Goddess of Mercy, has a bell fourteen feet high, nine feet in diameter, ten and three-fourths inches thick, and weighing fifty-six tons. It was cast in the beginning of the seventeenth century. At the temple Chion-in, in the same city, there is a bell ten feet ten inches high, nine feet in diameter, nine and one-half inches thick, and weighing forty-three tons. It was cast in the year 1633. Still older than either of these—the oldest bell in Japan indeed—is that of Tōdai-ji at Nara. Cast in 732, it is twelve feet nine inches high, eight feet ten inches in diameter, ten inches thick, and its weight is forty-nine tons. At innumerable places throughout the country, bells of smaller but still noble proportions toll the passing hours or summon the people to special services. But they are never heard at funerals. The glory and credit of having cast these wonderful bells belong exclusively to the Japanese, for though they took the shape originally from China, they soon surpassed her in the size and quality of their castings. Peking boasts a bell cast in 1406, by order of the great Ming Emperor Yung-lo. It was long supposed to be the biggest bell in the world by persons ignorant of the Tsar Kolokol and its smaller sister at Moscow. The Peking bell weighs fifty-three tons, and is therefore four tons heavier than the Nara bell, but the latter was cast six hundred and seventy-four years earlier than the former. The second biggest bell of