The Four Instruments and the Four Kinds of Being

In a Korean temple the wooden fish belongs to a set. The bell pavilion holds four instruments, sounded in order at dawn and at dusk: the great bronze bell, the dharma drum, the cloud shaped metal plate and the hanging wooden fish. The tradition assigns each an audience. The bell is struck for beings suffering in the hells, the drum for animals, the flat cloud plate for beings that move through the air, and the fish for those that live in water. Sounded together they are understood to reach across the whole of the living world, so the daily opening and closing of a monastery is framed as an address to everything alive rather than as a call to the monks.

The fish shape carries a separate explanation that is repeated widely and should be reported as tradition rather than as history: a fish does not close its eyes, so the instrument stands for a wakefulness that does not lapse, which is the quality monastic discipline is trying to cultivate. Variants of the story attach a moral tale to it, of a monk reborn as a fish with a tree growing from its back. Nothing in the archaeological or textual record fixes the origin of the form, and the wooden fish is shared with Chinese, Japanese and Vietnamese practice, so the Korean instrument should be read as one member of an East Asian family rather than as a local invention.