muckefuck | A spin of the wheel (Reply)

転法輪寺新築記念

The above is part of a dedicatory inscription on a kogō (incense case) in

monshu's collection. He's been obsessed with the little buggers lately, which is bad news for me since (a) the inscriptions are in bloody Japanese and (b) they generally aren't too legible, especially on the ceramic specimens. In this case, I had a bit of a Rosetta Stone deal, what with a portion of the text (the name of a temple, as it turns out) being repeated on the box in seal script. Honestly, I don't know if that was a help or a hindrance in the longer run, since it included a character variant so obscure (灋) that I couldn't find it anywhere. I can't remember this happening before, where I came across a character in my seal script dictionary that I couldn't look up in any other lexicon online or in my personal library.

Fortunately, we have the Giles dictionary here at work, so that's one mystery solved: The object commemorates building done on the Expounding-the-Dharma Temple (Tempōrin-ji). I still haven't narrowed it down to which Expounding-the-Dharma Temple since there are apparently a fair number of them.