Cao Dong Buddhism (Sōtō Zen) is one of the schools of Zen in China, founded in the Tang dynasty by the monk Liang Yi of Dong Mountain in Jiangxi Province. In the 13th century, Japanese Zen master Dogen crossed the sea to study Buddhism in the Southern Song Dynasty and attained enlightenment at Tendouji Temple in Zhejiang Province, and returned to Japan to found Yongping Temple, the founder of the Japanese Sōtō Zen Sect. In 1910, the two main temples of the Sōtō Zen sect, Yongping Temple and Sotoji Temple, built the "Daibonsan Taiwan Temple" outside the eastern gate of Taipei's capital city. The original wooden building was destroyed by a typhoon in 1915, and was rebuilt in 1923 with reinforced concrete, with the addition of Kuri and Inari.

In 1914, a Minnan-style Kuan Yin meditation hall was built on the left side of the main hall, and in 1922, a two-story Buddhist high school was added as a place for monks and disciples to study the Dharma. 1920, the Taiwan Buddhist Temple commissioned a famous Buddhist bell maker from Kyoto, Saiziro Takahashi, to cast a bell, and from 1926 to 1930, a bell tower was built at the front of the main hall, forming a square building complex. Since the 1950s, the main hall, the bell tower and the surrounding open space were repeatedly occupied by the public and gradually damaged.

Between 1970 and 1973, Wu Chen Yen painted three watercolor paintings of the bell tower of this Buddhist temple, and the work from 1970 is now in the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, where the frontal form of the main hall can still be seen behind the bell tower. This painting, "Sōtō Zen Bell Tower," is composed at an oblique angle, with the view from the lower edge of the painting, where two roads meet at right angles, looking toward the street and houses on the other side of the boundary. The bell tower stands behind the illegal wooden building, the bottom pedestal and the arched doorway can be seen vaguely, the upper floor is dark in color, the hillside roof has wide and deep eaves, and the imitation Song style railing is simple and elegant from a distance. Most of the small residential buildings along the roadside are street-side stores with brightly colored signboards and sunshades, which make the clock tower even more dilapidated.