Nara, Japan
東大寺 · TOH-die-jee
A bronze Buddha fifteen metres high, cast in the 740s by an emperor who hoped it would save his country from plague and revolt. It sits in a wooden hall that was the largest wooden building on earth, and that is only two-thirds the size of the first one.
Photo: Felix Filnkössl, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons
You are facing a wooden hall 57 metres wide and 48 high. Inside sits a Buddha of bronze nearly 15 metres tall. His face alone is five metres long, and a grown person could stand on his open palm.
He was dedicated in the year 752. It took nearly all the copper in Japan to cast him, and the work left the treasury empty.
Part of Nara Park.
The grounds, the south gate, the hall on the hill and the outside of the treasure house are free. Four buildings charge 800 yen each. One combined ticket covers the Great Buddha Hall and the museum.
| Part | Ticket |
|---|---|
| The Great South Gate and the guardians | Free, always open |
| The Great Buddha Hall | 800 yen |
| Tōdai-ji Museum | 800 yen; 1,200 yen with the Great Buddha Hall |
| Nigatsu-dō, the hall of the second month | Free, always open |
| Hokke-dō | 800 yen; closes at 16:00 |
| The ordination hall (Kaidan-dō) | 800 yen; closes at 16:00 |
| The Shōsō-in treasure house | Outside only; free; weekdays |
In the 730s smallpox killed perhaps a third of the people of Japan. Crops failed and a nobleman rebelled. Emperor Shōmu, a devout Buddhist, decided to build a temple in every province and one great Buddha at the centre to protect them all.
This Buddha is Vairocana, the Buddha of light who fills the universe. His right hand is raised to say "do not be afraid". His left lies open to say "your wishes are granted".
Twice the hall burned in civil wars and the statue was left in ruins. The head you see was cast in 1690. The hall was finished in 1709. Parts of the lotus petals he sits on and of his knees are from the first casting.
Before you leave, find the wooden pillar with a hole through its base, behind the Buddha to the right. The hole is the size of one of his nostrils.
"It is the biggest Buddha in Japan." The bronze Buddha at Kamakura is smaller, and modern statues elsewhere are far taller. This is the largest bronze Buddha seated indoors, and the oldest of the giants.
"The hall is the original." The first hall was 86 metres wide. This is the third, and it has seven bays where the first had eleven.
"Tōdai-ji is the hall with the Buddha." The temple covers the whole hillside: a great gate, a bell tower, halls older than the Buddha's, and a treasure house. Most of it is free.
"The deer belong to the temple." They belong to nobody. Their story is on the page for Nara Park.
The stops follow the walk in: the gate, the hall, the Buddha, then up the hill behind.
The gate is 25 metres high and was rebuilt in 1199 after a typhoon blew down the old one. Its eighteen pillars are single tree trunks that run the full height. The monk who built it, Chōgen, had been to Song China three times and used a way of framing he saw there.
The two guardians inside are over eight metres tall. The sculptors Unkei and Kaikei and their workshop made them in 1203, in sixty-nine days. Each is put together from some three thousand pieces of cypress. One has his mouth open and one has it shut: the first and last sounds of the alphabet, the beginning and the end of all things.
The two stone lions on the inner side were carved in 1196 by masons from Song China, in Chinese stone.
Almost everything here has burned at least once. The eight-sided bronze lantern in front of the hall has not. It has stood on this spot since the 750s. On its panels, heavenly musicians play the flute and the cymbals.
The hall of 1709 is 57 metres wide, 50 deep and 48 high. Until 1998 it was the largest wooden building in the world. Trees big enough for the main beams could no longer be found near Nara, and two pines were hauled from the far south of Japan.
The big pillars are not single trunks either. Each is a bundle of timbers held together with iron bands. In the repair of 1906 to 1913, steel trusses made in Britain were hidden in the roof to stop it sagging.
The two golden horns on the roof ridge are fish tails. They are a charm against fire, since fish live in water.
The casting began in 747 and took eight pours over two years. The figure used about 500 tonnes of bronze. It was then covered in gold leaf with mercury, which poisoned many of the workers.
On 9 April 752 an Indian monk named Bodhisena painted in the pupils of the eyes with a huge brush. Long cords ran from the brush to the hands of the emperor and of thousands of monks, so that all of them shared in the act. The brush and the cords still exist.
The head fell off in an earthquake in 855. In 1180 the whole temple was burned in a war between two clans, and the head and hands melted. A founder from Song China named Chen Heqing was brought in to recast them. In 1567 the hall burned again, and for more than a hundred years the Buddha sat in the rain with a copper sheet for a face.
The model for a Buddha this size was in China. The great stone Vairocana at Longmen, near Luoyang, was finished in 675, and Japanese envoys had seen it. This site has a page for Longmen.
Behind the Buddha, one pillar has a square hole cut through its base, 37 centimetres by 30. It is said to be the size of the Buddha's nostril. Children wriggle through easily. Adults go in with arms stretched forward and are pulled out by friends.
Outside the hall, to the right of the doors, sits a worn wooden figure in a red bib and cap. He is Binzuru, a follower of the Buddha with the gift of healing. Rub the part of him that matches where you hurt, then rub yourself.
A path leads east and up to a hall on stilts with a wide balcony. Entry is free at any hour, and the view over the roofs of the great hall to the city is the best in Nara. Come at dusk.
Every year since 752, without one break, monks have held two weeks of repentance here at the start of spring. Each night from 1 to 14 March they run along the balcony with pine torches six metres long, and the sparks rain down on the crowd. To be touched by a spark is lucky.
Beside it is the Hokke-dō, begun in the 740s. It is the oldest building of the temple, older than the Buddha.
North of the great hall, behind a fence, stands a long storehouse of dark logs on forty pillars. When Emperor Shōmu died in 756, his widow gave his belongings to the Buddha, and they were locked in here.
There are about nine thousand things, and they are in near-perfect state: lutes inlaid with mother-of-pearl, glass from Persia, medicines, maps, the brush that opened the Buddha's eyes. Much of it came from Tang China along the Silk Road, and much of it has no surviving match in China itself.
The storehouse is seen from outside only. A selection of the treasures is shown for about two weeks each autumn at the Nara National Museum, ten minutes' walk away.
When the Buddha's eyes were opened in 752, the Tang empire was at its richest, under Emperor Xuanzong. Three years later the general An Lushan rebelled and the great age of the Tang (618–907) was over.
Japan sent ship after ship of students and monks to Chang'an in these decades. The plan of Nara, the robes of its court, its writing, its Buddhism and the idea of a giant Buddha all came back with them.
When the present hall was finished in 1709, the Kangxi Emperor was on the throne of the Qing (1644–1912).
| Year | Here | Elsewhere |
|---|---|---|
| 735–737 | Smallpox kills about a third of Japan | The Tang under Emperor Xuanzong, at its height |
| 743 | Emperor Shōmu orders the Great Buddha | The Longmen Vairocana is 68 years old |
| 752 | The eyes are opened | Three years before the An Lushan rebellion |
| 754 | Jianzhen gives the vows before the hall | He had left Yangzhou the year before |
| 1180 | The temple burns in the war of the clans | The Southern Song (1127–1279); founders and masons come from China to help rebuild |
| 1203 | The two guardians are carved | Three years before Genghis Khan unites the Mongols |
| 1567 | The hall burns again | First year of the Longqing Emperor of the Ming |
| 1709 | The present hall is finished | Forty-eighth year of the Kangxi Emperor |
One line to remember: cast in 752 to save a country, burned twice, and rebuilt each time a little smaller.
These are stories people tell about this place. They are legends, not history, and each one says where it comes from.
Anyone who passes through the hole in the pillar will be free of illness for a year, and will reach enlightenment in the next life.
Source: Popular belief; the temple says the hole was cut to ward off evil from the north-east
A god who was late for the first ceremony in 752 made up for it by sending holy water under the ground from his own province, a hundred kilometres away. It rose in a well at the foot of the hall. Each year the monks draw it on the twelfth night.
Source: The picture scroll of the hall's origins, sixteenth century
When the Buddha was nearly finished there was no gold in Japan to gild him. Then gold was found for the first time in the far north. The emperor took it as an answer from the Buddha and changed the name of the era.
Source: The official chronicle Shoku Nihongi, for the year 749
Binzuru sits outside the hall because he once showed off his powers to ordinary people, and the Buddha shut him out.
Source: Buddhist tradition
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 English page of hours and fees, opened in November 2026.
Checked 2026-11-12
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