The great temple bell famed in the Dōjōji legend. When the monk Anchin hid inside the bell, a woman whose love had turned to vengeful fury transformed into a serpent, coiled around it, and scorched it with searing heat. Traditions diverge: some describe a Noh-style image of the bell turning to boiling water that swallows the monk, while other engi accounts say the fire was quenched and the bell survived. Toriyama Sekien illustrated this variant as “Dōjōji Bell” in Konjaku Hyakki Shūi.
Folklore & Legends
In the Dōjōji engi, the woman becomes a serpent, wraps the bell, breathes fire, and after it burns for a long time, water extinguishes the flames and the bell is removed. In the Noh play Dōjōji, however, “the bell becomes hot water” and swallows the yamabushi, emphasizing a tale of the bell’s dissolution. Sekien’s drawing notes “the bell melts into hot water,” yet also records that the bell was housed at another temple, showing how sources vary.
An iconographic reading of the Dōjōji bell as depicted in Toriyama Sekien’s Konjaku Hyakki Shūi. While a note alludes to a variant in which the woman, transformed into a serpent, coils around the bell hiding Anchin and heats it until it melts into scalding liquid, hearsay also holds that the bell itself survived in historical record. Its “yokai nature” here is less an ensouled object than a visualization of folk belief in obsession possessing a vessel and causing anomalies. It represents Edo-period reception where Noh, sekkyō, and engi traditions intermingle.
Character Profile
This section is our own creative profile for storytelling. It is not historical fact or scholarship.
turns dire when bound to grudges, dangerous when linked to obsessive attachment
Abilities
conduit of obsession (receives passions and triggers anomalies)incandescence (the bell grows searing hot in certain tellings)place of concealment (functions as a vessel that hides a person within)
Weaknesses
quenching by water (in engi-line variants), pacification through Buddhist rites and sutra chanting
Habitat
Kii Province, Dōjōji Temple, later transmissions in Kyoto-area temples and other custodial sites
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The diagram below is a diagnostic evaluation chart for Sekien Zue – The Dōjōji Bell. The higher the value of each item, the stronger that characteristic is expressed.
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