Nara, Japan
興福寺 · KOH-foo-koo-jee
A five-storey pagoda fifty metres high, a boy-faced god with six arms, and a great hall rebuilt in 2018 after three hundred years. This was the family temple of the Fujiwara and once ruled the whole province. Today you walk straight in off the street, because in 1868 it lost its walls and nearly everything else.
Photo: Zairon, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons
You are on open grass in the middle of a city, with deer. On one side stands a dark wooden hall and, beside it, a pagoda of five roofs. On the other is a much larger hall, bright red and white, that looks new, and is.
The temple came to this spot in 710, when Nara became the capital. In China it was the last years before the reign of Emperor Xuanzong of Tang (618–907). The pagoda you see was put up about 1426, six years after the Forbidden City was finished in Beijing.
Part of Nara Park. Also there: Kasuga Taisha, Tōdai-ji.
The grounds are free and never close. Three buildings charge: the Central Golden Hall, the Eastern Golden Hall and the museum. The other halls are seen from outside and open on a few days a year. The five-storey pagoda is covered for repair.
| Part | Ticket |
|---|---|
| The grounds | Free, always open |
| The five-storey pagoda | Not entered; covered by scaffolding during repair |
| The Eastern Golden Hall | 500 yen |
| The Central Golden Hall | 500 yen |
| The National Treasure Museum | 900 yen |
| The South Octagonal Hall | Outside free; open on 17 October only |
| The North Octagonal Hall | Outside free; open for some weeks in spring and autumn |
| The three-storey pagoda | Outside free; open on 7 July |
| Sarusawa Pond | Free |
Kōfuku-ji was the private temple of the Fujiwara, the family that governed Japan through its emperors for three hundred years. As they rose, it grew to more than a hundred and fifty buildings. In the Middle Ages its monks kept an army and ran the province.
It burned again and again: in a civil war in 1180, and in a fire in 1717 that took the western half. Each time the Fujiwara, or the townspeople, rebuilt part of it.
Then in 1868 the new government turned against Buddhism. The monks were made priests of the shrine up the hill, the walls came down, and the grounds became a public park. That is why there is no gate and no ticket for the grounds.
Before you leave, go into the museum for one statue: Ashura, made in 734, with three young faces and six thin arms.
"The pagoda is the oldest thing here." The small three-storey pagoda down the slope and the North Octagonal Hall are both two hundred years older.
"The big red hall is restored." It is new. It was built between 2010 and 2018 on the old foundations, to the old measurements, in place of a hall that burned in 1717.
"It is part of the park." The park was laid out on the temple's land in 1880. The temple was allowed to reopen the next year, without its walls.
"Ashura is a fierce god." In India he was a demon who fought the gods. Here he is a guardian who has given up fighting, and the sculptor gave him the face of a troubled boy.
"You can go inside the pagoda." You cannot, and until the early 2030s you can hardly see it: it is wrapped in scaffolding for its first full repair in 120 years.
The stops begin at the pond below the temple and climb the steps, as visitors did for a thousand years.
Sarusawa Pond was dug in 749 as the temple's pond for releasing fish, an act of mercy that earns merit. It is 360 metres round. The view across it to the pagoda above the willows has been the picture of Nara on prints and postcards for three centuries.
Turtles sun themselves on the stones. On the north-west bank a tiny shrine stands with its back to the water; its story is in the legends below.
Fifty-two stone steps lead up from the pond to the temple. The number is said to stand for the fifty-two stages a follower passes on the way to becoming a Buddha.
The first pagoda here was raised in 730 by Empress Kōmyō, a Fujiwara daughter. It burned five times. This one dates from about 1426 and is 50 metres high, the second tallest old wooden pagoda in Japan.
A pagoda is a grave marker: it stands over a relic of the Buddha. Nobody climbs it. The upper floors have no real rooms, and a single pillar runs up the middle from the ground to the spire.
In 2024 a steel shed began to rise round it. The roof tiles, the plaster and parts of the frame are being taken down and repaired, for the first time since 1901.
Emperor Shōmu founded this hall in 726 to pray for the recovery of his aunt, the retired empress. It is 1,300 years old this year as an institution; the building in front of you is the sixth, finished in 1415.
Inside sits the Buddha of healing in bronze, with the bodhisattvas of the sun and the moon. Around them stand twelve armoured generals, each with the animal of one of the twelve years on his head.
In 1937, workmen repairing the altar found a bronze head a metre high hidden under it. It was the head of a Buddha cast in 685 for another temple. The monks of Kōfuku-ji had carried that statue off by force in 1187 to replace one they had lost; a later fire melted the body. The head is now in the museum.
This was the heart of the temple, and it burned seven times. After the fire of 1717 there was no money to rebuild it, and a small makeshift hall stood here for two centuries.
The new hall opened in October 2018. It is 37 metres wide and 21 high, and stands on the foundation stones of 710. Japan no longer has trees big enough for its sixty-six pillars. They are African hardwood from Cameroon, and the beams are Canadian cypress.
Look at the two gilded ornaments on the ridge. They are fish tails, a charm against fire.
The museum stands where the monks' dining hall stood, and holds what was saved from the burnt halls. Photography is not allowed inside.
Ashura is 153 centimetres tall and weighs about fifteen kilograms. He is hollow: layers of hemp cloth soaked in lacquer were built up over a clay core, and the clay was then dug out. That is why he could be carried out of every fire.
Empress Kōmyō had him made in 734, one of a set of eight guardians, in memory of her mother. Look at the three faces in turn. The left one bites its lip; the right one holds something back; the front one has decided.
Near him are two small demons of 1215 carrying lanterns, one on his shoulder and one on his head, glad for once to be useful.
This eight-sided hall is the busiest place in the temple and has nothing to do with tourists. It is the ninth stop on a pilgrimage of thirty-three temples of Kannon, the bodhisattva of mercy, that people have walked since the Middle Ages.
Pilgrims light incense, ring the gong and have their books stamped and inscribed at the office beside it. The hall itself was founded in 813 and last rebuilt in 1789. Its doors open on one day a year, 17 October.
The North Octagonal Hall was built in 721, a year after the death of the man who brought the temple to Nara, and rebuilt about 1210. It is called the most beautiful eight-sided hall in Japan. Inside, when it is open, are a Buddha and two Indian monks carved by Unkei, the greatest sculptor of his age; the monks look like men you might meet.
Down the slope to the south-west, missed by almost everyone, is a three-storey pagoda nineteen metres high, rebuilt soon after the fire of 1180. With the North Octagonal Hall it is the oldest building the temple has.
In 1868 the government ordered gods and Buddhas to be separated. Kōfuku-ji and the Kasuga shrine had been one body for a thousand years. Every monk here left the priesthood in a single day and became a priest of the shrine.
The empty halls were used as offices and a school. Statues were burned for the gold leaf or sold abroad. The earthen walls and gates were pulled down, and in 1880 the land was made part of Nara Park.
The poet Masaoka Shiki came through in the autumn of 1895, fourteen years after the temple was allowed to reopen:
秋風や 囲ひもなしに 興福寺
The autumn wind: with no wall round it, Kōfuku-ji
Masaoka Shiki, 1895
The walls have never been rebuilt. In the grass west of the Central Golden Hall you can still find the foundation stones of halls that were not rebuilt either.
| Year | Here | Elsewhere |
|---|---|---|
| 669 | The temple is founded near Kyoto by the wife of the first Fujiwara | Tang China: the monk Xuanzang, whose teaching this temple follows, died five years ago |
| 710 | It moves to the new capital, Nara | Chang'an, the model for Nara, is the largest city in the world |
| 734 | Ashura is made | Li Bai is thirty-three; in England the historian Bede is finishing his life's work |
| 1180 | Burned in the war between the Taira and the Minamoto | Southern Song (1127–1279) China; in Paris, Notre-Dame has been building for seventeen years |
| about 1426 | The present pagoda is finished | The Forbidden City is six years old; in Florence, Brunelleschi is raising his dome |
| 1717 | Fire destroys the western half | The Kangxi emperor reigns in China; Handel's Water Music is played on the Thames |
| 1868 | The monks are sent away and the walls come down | The Meiji Restoration; in China, the Tongzhi reign |
| 2018 | The Central Golden Hall is rebuilt after 301 years | The year before the fire at Notre-Dame in Paris |
Films from official channels, played from YouTube. Nothing is loaded until you press play.
These are stories people tell about this place. They are legends, not history, and each one says where it comes from.
A serving girl at the palace fell in love with the emperor. He sent for her once and never again. She drowned herself in Sarusawa Pond. A shrine was built for her on the bank; she could not bear to look at the water, and in one night turned the shrine round so that its back is to the pond.
Source: Yamato Monogatari (tenth century); the turning of the shrine is local tradition
A monk with a long nose, tired of being teased, set up a sign by the pond: "On the third day of the third month a dragon will rise from this water." Crowds came from every province. The monk, watching them, began to believe it himself.
Source: Uji Shūi Monogatari (thirteenth century); retold by Akutagawa Ryūnosuke in "Dragon", 1919
The water of Sarusawa Pond is never clear and never muddy; none flows in and none flows out; no frogs breed in it and no weeds grow; and its fish are seven parts to three of water.
Source: A saying of Nara townspeople, recorded since the Edo period
Later, people who live here will be able to add the stories they grew up with, and say which of these they have heard.
Last checked 2026-11-12. The temple's own site (kohfukuji.com), admission page and today's notice, opened in November 2026.
Checked 2026-11-12
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