Nara

Japan's first permanent capital was laid out on a Chinese grid in 710, and within a generation the court had decided that Buddhism was an instrument of government. Emperor Shomu ordered a monastery and a convent in every province, each holding copies of protective scriptures, and in 743 announced the casting of a colossal image of the cosmic Buddha Vairocana as the centre of that system. The monk Gyoki, who had been building bridges and irrigation works and preaching to ordinary people in defiance of restrictions on doing so, was recruited to raise subscriptions.

The image consumed an enormous quantity of bronze and gold and took years to cast in stages. At the eye opening ceremony in 752 an Indian monk painted in the pupils with a brush, cords were run from it so that the assembled thousands could share the act, and dancers and musicians performed pieces from China, Korea and further west. The offerings presented at that ceremony were stored in a raised timber repository beside the temple and are still there, the oldest intact treasury of its kind anywhere.

The six schools of Nara Buddhism were academic traditions studied within temples rather than sects with congregations, and a monk could work in more than one. The court also worried about ordination being taken lightly, and after five failed voyages the Chinese master Ganjin arrived, by then blind, to establish a proper ordination platform, so that Japanese monks were monks by a recognised procedure.

Kasuga Taisha was founded as the shrine of the Fujiwara, the family that supplied empresses and ministers for centuries. Its principal deity is said to have come from Kashima in the east riding a white deer, which is why the deer that wander the park and the shrine approach have been treated as messengers of the god and protected for a thousand years. Thousands of stone and bronze lanterns line the paths, given by donors over the centuries and lit twice a year.

Beside it stands Kofuku-ji, the Fujiwara temple, and the pairing is the point. Medieval Japanese religion worked on the understanding that the kami of a place were local manifestations of buddhas and bodhisattvas, an arrangement given theoretical form as original ground and traces left behind. Kasuga and Kofuku-ji were administered together for most of their history, monks served at the shrine, and painted mandalas of Kasuga show the shrine buildings in the landscape with the corresponding buddhas above them.

That arrangement was broken by government order. In 1868 the new Meiji administration commanded the separation of kami from buddhas, expelling Buddhist clergy from shrines, removing Buddhist images and titles, and setting off a wave of destruction of temple property that the order had not explicitly demanded but did nothing to restrain. Kofuku-ji lost its lands, its monks were laicised and its five storey pagoda was offered for sale. The two institutions are separate today, and the thousand year synthesis they embodied has to be reconstructed from what survives.