Tōdai-ji

Tōdai-ji, whose name means "Eastern Great Temple", is a complex of Buddhist temples in Nara, the first permanent capital of Japan. Founded by Emperor Shōmu in the 740s and formally inaugurated in 752, it was built to house a colossal bronze image of the cosmic Buddha Vairocana, the Daibutsu, which remains the largest bronze statue of the Buddha in the world. Once one of the Seven Great Temples of Nara and the hub of state-sponsored Buddhism, it has been burned and rebuilt several times, and its Great Buddha Hall was for centuries the largest wooden building on earth.

The temple grew from a smaller foundation, Kinshōsen-ji, set up in 728. The decades that followed were troubled: a smallpox epidemic around 735 to 737, years of failed harvests, an alleged coup and a rebellion in 740, and four moves of the capital. Emperor Shōmu responded in 741 by ordering a network of provincial temples across the country, with Kinshōsen-ji at its head, and in 743 he commanded the casting of a giant Buddha, in the hope that such devotion would win divine protection for the state. The plan drew on the much-admired temples of Tang China.

The monk Gyōki toured the provinces raising support. The temple's own records claim that more than 2.6 million people contributed rice, timber, metal, cloth or labour, and that 350,000 worked on the statue itself. Casting began at Shigaraki but moved to Nara in 745, when the court returned there and the name Tōdai-ji first appears. Cast in eight stages, the figure, about 16 metres high, was finished in 751, using much of Japan's bronze and imported gold. At the eye-opening ceremony of 752 the Indian priest Bodhisena performed the rite before, according to the temple's account, 10,000 monks and 4,000 dancers. Two great pagodas once flanked the complex, and the Shōsōin storehouse preserved treasures of the period.

Under the Nara state, Buddhism was closely regulated, and Tōdai-ji served as the administrative hub of the provincial temples and of the six officially recognised schools, each of which kept offices there. Monks had to be ordained at the temple; in 754 the Chinese master Ganjin, who had reached Japan after twelve years and six attempts to cross the sea, ordained the retired Shōmu, Empress Kōken and others. Later figures such as Kūkai and Saichō were also ordained here. As religious authority shifted to Mount Hiei and political power moved to the warrior government at Kamakura, the temple's influence waned, and its ordination lineage eventually died out.

The temple suffered repeatedly. In 855 the head of the Great Buddha fell off and had to be replaced. Much worse came during the Genpei War: in January 1181 forces of the Taira clan, punishing the Nara monasteries for siding with their enemies, set fire to the city, and Tōdai-ji and Kōfuku-ji burned. Reconstruction was backed by Minamoto no Yoritomo and directed by the monk Chōgen, who rebuilt in a style derived from Song China. The Great South Gate dates from this campaign, as do its two towering guardian figures by the sculptors Unkei and Kaikei.

In the 1560s, in fighting between the warlord Matsunaga Hisahide and the Miyoshi, the temple was again destroyed, a deed counted against Hisahide as infamous. The present Great Buddha Hall was completed in 1709; for lack of funds it is about 30 per cent smaller than its predecessor, seven bays wide rather than eleven. The statue too is a patchwork of repairs, with hands from the Momoyama period and a head from the Edo period.

By the late nineteenth century the hall's roof and pillars were warping under their own weight and collapse seemed possible. A first major restoration ran from 1904 to 1913, and the hall escaped the air raids of World War II. A second campaign from 1974 to 1980 removed the roof and reinforced the structure with steel, giving the building its current form. It held the title of largest wooden building until 1998.

Today Tōdai-ji is the headquarters of the Kegon school of Buddhism in Japan. In 1998 it was inscribed by UNESCO as part of the Historic Monuments of Ancient Nara, and several of its buildings are National Treasures. A culture centre with a museum and library opened in 2011.