Todaiji Temple

Points of View
(1)The structure of the main gate
(2)View from the gate to the front
(3)The size of images

On a personal note, I lived in Tokyo as a young boy, and later moved to another city. Returning to attend college in Tokyo at twenty years old gave me the chance to take the subway and visit the town where I had lived as a child. After passing through the ticket gate in the subway, I went up to ground level. Looking around, good memories of the time came back to me, but at the same time I felt something strange. The road seemed narrower than I had expected, and moving on to the place where I had lived, the preschool I had attended seemed closer than before. As a little boy, I had felt that it was further from home to preschool. Next, I went to the large park where I had played before, which also seemed smaller. It is of course natural that things felt narrower, closer and smaller simply because I had grown up. Have you experienced this kind of thing?

Todaiji Temple is noted for its huge image of the Buddha and the enormous wooden structure that houses it. Everything is big in Todaiji Temple. It seems almost as if gigantic men, much bigger than human beings, existed in those days and made these buildings. The buildings remind me of childhood when everything seemed big. They were constructed in the hope of putting an end to the series of disasters, famines and infections that had stricken Japan at the time. The height of the Buddha image is about sixteen meters, a number representing infinity in Buddhism.

Now, let’s look at Todaiji Temple. In general, souvenir shops and sightseeing spots go hand in hand, and Todaiji Temple is no exception to this. Passing among these gift shops, you see a big gate towering in front of the approach. From a distance, men around the gate look very small, just like little boys. It is about 30 meters high, or almost as tall as an eight-story building. As you approach it, you feel the strong presence of its size even more. Two gigantic wooden statues, carved more than 1,000 years ago, stand facing each other on either side of the gate. Images in those days were powerful, dynamic and realistic, as are these. Looking up at the gate, you see the long towering columns jointed with many beams, and cannot see the end of them. When it was built, the structure-oriented gate was made and the framework of the structure itself became the design, just like the work of Sir Norman Foster, the noted architect.

Passing through this big gate, you go straight and see another gate ahead. In front of this gate is the massive structure that houses the huge statue. After going through the gate, the enormous building lies in front of you. This is the largest piece of wooden architecture in the world, and people look tiny in front of it which serves to highlight its sheer size.

The size of the buildings, the gates and the site here may have been decided in proportion to the size of the big statue in the main building. Some scholars say that two 100-m high pagodas, as tall as thirty-story buildings, used to stand magnificently in the complex. Because the statue is so big, all the other structures need to be big too. Looking at these huge structures and images, I feel the great power of mankind, as well as its powerlessness.