Todai-Ji

At the base of one of the enormous pillars in the northeast corner of the Great Buddha Hall, someone cut a rectangular hole. It is said to be the same size as the Great Buddha's nostril, and the tradition is that if you can get through it, good fortune follows. Children slide through in a second. Adults line up anyway, go in headfirst, and a fair number get wedged halfway and have to be pulled out by their friends, laughing, in the middle of one of the most solemn rooms in Japan.

That is the tone of the place, and it is worth knowing before you get to the rest, because everything else about this building is heavy.

Built Out Of A Catastrophe

The statue exists because of a smallpox epidemic. It arrived in Japan in the 730s, ran for years, and killed a very large share of the population, including all four brothers of the court's most powerful family within a few months of each other. Taxes went uncollected. A revolt broke out in the west. Drought followed.

In 743, Emperor Shōmu ordered a temple in every province and, at the center of the network, a colossal bronze Buddha. His edict says something unusual for an emperor: that he could of course spend the wealth and copper of the state, but that the work would only mean anything if ordinary people brought a single stalk of grass or a single handful of earth to it. The man who actually collected those handfuls was a monk named Gyōki, whom the same government had previously banned from preaching to crowds without a license, and who was now made head of the project because nobody else could raise money in the countryside.

Casting A Giant In Slices

There was no way to pour something that size at once. The Buddha was built upward in horizontal sections: mould, pour, wait for it to cool, pile earth around it, build the next mould on top, pour again. It took years and consumed an enormous share of the country's copper. There was also not enough gold for the gilding, so when gold was found in the far north in 749, the court read it as divine endorsement and changed the era name. What emerged was a seated Vairocana Buddha close to fifteen meters high, in a hall that ranked among the largest wooden structures ever built.

The dedication came in 752. An Indian monk, known in Japanese sources as Bodhisena, climbed the scaffolding and painted in the eyes, the ritual that "opens" a statue. Cords ran from the brush down into the hall, and thousands of people held them so that the brushstroke belonged to all of them. Musicians and dancers came from Tang China, from Korea, from further south. The brush and the cords are still kept in the temple's treasure house.

What Burned

In 1180, during the Genpei War, an army sacked Nara and the hall burned. The heat was such that the Buddha's head melted and fell. Rebuilding fell to a monk named Chōgen, well into his sixties, who toured the provinces for donations, imported techniques and craftsmen from China, and put the hall back up in a heavy bracketed style Japan had not seen before. The great gate at the entrance is his; the two guardian figures inside it, over eight meters tall, were carved by the workshops of Unkei and Kaikei in 1203 in roughly two and a half months.

Then in 1567 two warlord armies fought on the temple grounds and the hall burned again. This time no rescue came for over a century, and the Buddha sat under a makeshift cover, often in open weather. The hall you walk into now opened in 1709, paid for by another nationwide subscription, and it is narrower than the original: trees of the required size no longer existed, so the main pillars were made by binding thinner logs together with iron bands.

A Sealed Storeroom

Behind the hall stands the Shōsōin, a raised wooden storehouse holding the personal possessions Shōmu's widow donated after his death in 756. Because it was sealed and opened only by imperial authority, its contents survived intact: a Persian-style cut glass bowl, a lute inlaid with mother-of-pearl, masks worn at the 752 ceremony, medicines still in their containers. It is the closest thing there is to an eighth-century room that was simply shut and left alone.

Now

Todai-ji has been on the World Heritage list since 1998 as part of the Historic Monuments of Ancient Nara. The fire-and-water rite performed each March at the Nigatsudō hall above the temple has run every year since 752, through wars, epidemics and the fires below it.

The threat is still fire. In a wooden building that has burned twice, prevention absorbs much of the conservation budget, alongside roof work, timber repair and modelling of how the structure behaves in an earthquake. For twelve centuries someone has come along and lifted the hall back up. The names change; the statue has not moved.