Todai-ji

The Great Buddha at Nara was a project of the eighth-century Japanese state, undertaken at a cost that contemporaries recognised as ruinous.

Why Shomu built it

Emperor Shomu commissioned the statue in 743, in the middle of a decade of smallpox epidemic, crop failure, earthquake and rebellion. The epidemic of 735-737 is estimated to have killed a very large proportion of the population, including the four Fujiwara brothers who dominated the court.

The Buddha was a response to that. Vairocana, the cosmic Buddha of the Kegon teaching, from whom all things emanate, an image of a single unifying principle, commissioned by a ruler trying to hold a state together.

The theology and the politics are not separable here, and the court did not pretend otherwise: a network of provincial temples was established at the same time, with Todai-ji at its head.

The cost

The statue is about fifteen metres and some five hundred tonnes of bronze. It was cast in eight stages between 747 and 749, in place, in a sequence of ascending moulds.

Court records describe a labour force running into millions of contributors of material, labour or funds, figures which should be read as indicating scale rather than counted literally. The bronze and gold consumed a substantial part of the country's available metal, and copper mining was pushed hard to supply it. Later Japanese historians have generally judged that the project came close to exhausting the treasury.

The monk Gyoki, who had a large popular following, was recruited to raise the subscriptions, an early instance of a state harnessing a religious movement it had previously regarded with suspicion.

The eye-opening

The consecration in 752 was performed by Bodhisena, an Indian monk who had travelled to Japan for the purpose, in a ceremony attended by envoys from China, Korea and beyond. The brush he used to paint in the eyes survives in the Shosoin repository.

That an Indian monk consecrated a Japanese imperial Buddha in 752 is the single best illustration of how far the Buddhist world reached in the eighth century.

What survives

Very little of the original.

The hall burned in 1180 during the Taira campaign and again in the sixteenth-century wars. The present Great Buddha Hall, raised in 1709, is about two-thirds the width of the original, still among the largest wooden buildings in the world, and a reduction.

The statue has been repaired so often that little of the eighth-century bronze survives above the knees. The head is seventeenth-century.

The deer

The deer in the surrounding park are protected as messengers of the kami of Kasuga Taisha next door, a surviving trace of how completely Shinto and Buddhist institutions were once entangled at Nara, before the Meiji separation edicts set about pulling them apart.

Todai-ji's Great Buddha Hall is routinely called the world's largest wooden building, and the version standing today is already a shrunken replacement of the original.

Smaller than it used to be

The current Daibutsuden, rebuilt in the Edo period after earlier structures were destroyed by fire, notably during twelfth century warfare and again in the sixteenth century, is narrower than the eighth century original, its rebuilders working with less timber and resources than the Nara state had commanded at the project's founding. Even reduced, it remains enormous by any premodern standard.

Guardians carved fast

The temple's Nandaimon gate houses two colossal wooden guardian statues, the Nio, attributed to master sculptors Unkei and Kaikei and their workshop, reportedly carved in an unusually short span of about two months in the early thirteenth century, an achievement often cited as evidence of the workshop's organised division of labour across multiple sculptors working simultaneously on different sections of each figure.

Deer that are not just scenery

The sika deer roaming Nara Park around the temple are treated locally as sacred messengers connected to the nearby Kasuga Shrine's tutelary deity, protected historically as divine animals rather than wildlife, a status that shaped centuries of local custom even though the deer population today is managed as a practical matter alongside its religious meaning.