Myōshin-ji Temple

This guide to Myoshin-ji in Kyoto opens in 1975, inside a bell foundry attempting to recast the exact tone of a bronze bell that has hung silent here since the seventh century. It follows two casting attempts that both missed the target pitch, then turns to the bell's own story, cast in 698 and possibly the oldest dated temple bell anywhere, and to the dragon painted across the ceiling of the hall behind it. The temple itself began in 1337 as an abdicated emperor's retirement villa, handed to a Zen master to become something greater.