Communing with God Through Venison and Big Bronze Buddhas

Day 12. Still in Kyoto; in fact, we’ll be staying here a few extra nights because it proved more difficult than expected to secure accommodations in Osaka or Kobe and both cities can be easily visited as day trips from Kyoto, anyway. (Which means I’ll save the Kyoto wrap up for until we’re done here)

In the meantime, we did take a little day trip today to Nara City, some 40 km south of Kyoto. Nara, in case you don’t know, was Japan’s capital before Kyoto was Japan’s capital (which was Japan’s capital before Tokyo became Japan’s capital) and is currently celebrating its 1,300th anniversary celebration.

The city is widely considered the birthplace of Japanese culture and features a lot of obvious Buddhist and Chinese influences (e.g., its many Buddhist temples) and is home to many of the country’s greatest cultural assets and national treasures. Among these are the purpose for our visit today — Nara Park’s wild sika deer and the Todai-ji, a Buddhist temple whose great hall is both the largest wooden building in the world and home to the world’s largest Buddha statue — the great, bronze Daibutsuden.

But first, the cute deer!

Over 1,200 wild sika deer (also known as spotted or Japanese deer) roam Nara Park — visitors can purchase deer crackers (鹿煎餅 shika-senbei) for ¥150 to feed the deer; they’re considered wild animals, but freely roam the park and temple grounds and are pretty friendly towards humans (many have even learned to bow their heads to ask for crackers).

The deer were even once considered divine messengers of Kasuga-jinja’s Shinto gods and killing one was a capital offense until 1637 (the last recorded date of that law’s enforcement). During World War II, their numbers dwindled to just 70, but conservation efforts and the extinction of wolves in Japan has allowed the deer population to boom, however, and Japan now boasts the largest native sika population int he world — more than hundreds of thousands.

Nara’s other major sight is, as I mentioned, the Eastern Great Temple (東大寺 Tōdai-ji). Its Great Buddha Hall (大仏殿 Daibutsuden) is the largest wooden building in the world and houses the world’s largest statue of the Buddha Vairocana, known in Japanese as Daibutsu (大仏). The temple is a designated UNESCO World Heritage Site and played a major role in the development of early Japanese Buddhism.

The Great Hall, amazingly, is only two-thirds the size of the original structure (the current building was completed in 1709 and measures 57 meters long by 50 meters wide). The original temple complex also contained two 100 meter-tall pagodas; a miniature model showing the original deisgn can be found within the Great Hall:

And also within the Great Hall, of course, is Daibatsu — at nearly 50 feet tall, the gargantuan Buddha statue’s scale is almost impossible to do justice in a photograph (even less so with my camera’s flimsy lens), but just to give you an idea, here’s a picture of the statute and a couple shots from the temple grounds: