Sanjusangendo

I’ve put up a set of photos here taken outside of Sanjusangendo, one of our favorite places in Japan. Sanjusangendo is a Buddhist temple in Kyoto that houses 1000 statues of the deity Kannon. We first visited it a couple of years ago when Sid took us there as our guide. When he described it as a long hall with 1000 gilded statues in it, Tracie and I somehow formed the mental image of a bunch of smallish statues maybe a foot or so in height. (Tracie observed that perhaps that impression was influenced by our earlier visit to Hase-Dera, at which there are hundreds of diminutive statutes.)

Our mental image was erroneous: the statues are life-sized. They’re arranged in ranks on ten tiers, rather like people standing on bleachers at a softball field. At the center is a large and elaborate statue of Kannon with a small altar in front of it. The entire hall is illuminated by diffuse natural light which comes through paper-covered windows opposite the statues. There are a few other statues of various deities and other figures, including famous statues Fujin and Raijin, the gods of wind and thunder, respectively.

The overall effect is rather mesmerizing. You enter from one end of the hall so the statues stretch off into the distance. As you walk past them you notice that while they are all very similar, they differ in small details. They are complex statues since Kannon is said to have 1000 arms. While the statues don’t have the full complement, they do have a lot of arms and a multitude of smaller, auxiliary heads above their usual head.

Photography is not permitted inside the hall so I don’t have any photos to show. The Wikipedia article does have one old-looking photo, and a Google image search turns up others.

When we visited this year we saw something we hadn’t seen on our previous two visits. Some of the statues were being carefully dismantled, wrapped, and carried out of the temple into a nearby van. Apparently they were being taken to some other location for cleaning. An elderly Japanese gentleman oversaw about four younger assistants who did most of the work, while a visibly and uncharacteristically tense monk oversaw all of them. Imagine the responsibility resting on your shoulders as you carry one of Japan’s designated National Treasures, dated from the 13th century, over two railings, out of a temple, down a short flight of steps, and into a van. I took a few photos of them from a discreet distance outside the temple. The flickr set also contains many photos of the sakura in the the beautiful garden behind the temple.