Yakushiji temple possessing the past, now and the future as the most beautiful temple


In Nara City is a beautiful temple. If you make the effort to visit Todaiji Temple in Nara City, I recommend visiting Yakushiji Temple in the same city.

When the area around Todaiji Temple and The Nara Park saw thousands of foreign travelers, but, the number of foreign travelers visiting Yakushiji Temple was much fewer than Todaiji Temple. Yakushiji Temple, which is one of the world heritage sites, is another wonderful place which is known next to nothing by them but popular for Japanese people.

Yakushiji Temple doesn’t give you an experience of that “you visited and saw it”, but if you visit there, you will feel the emotionality of Yakushiji Temple and it will enable you to get a time slip from ancient times and the future. You are in for a treat.

Yakushiji Temple

To describe Yakushiji Temple in a word, it is a temple of beauty like a jewel box.

All Buddhist statues in Yakushiji Temple are very beautiful with intelligence. When I saw the swinging-hip Buddhist statues through a big window of a vermillion wall from the outside, light from outside shone on the statues in the dark room. I want you to look at the pictures above. There is no other Buddhist statue which has a good balanced body swinging its hips.  

I think the reason of the beauty in the Buddhist statues is based on the strong wish of the founder and the prayer of the successor. The founder of this temple is the Emperor Temmu, he was a great emperor in the seventh century and he was the first to call himself “an emperor (“ten-no” in Japanese)”. He ordered the construction of Yakushiji Temple for his precious wife’s recovery, and his wife who was the next emperor Jito following Temmu, worshiped Buddhism. She was so good for the governance of Japan and for the culture that she was the first and only female emperor who actually governed Japan. So for the sake of prayer of Jito and for health, the Buddhist statues are elegant and vivid, I think.

Next, the two wall paintings in the temple are wonderful too. One is the wall painting painted by Ikuo Hirayama which depicts the scenes where the renowned Buddhist, Genjo, who was the first Chinese to visit for seeking sutras of Buddhism. The other is the wall painting painted by Toshio Tabuchi which depicts the scenes where Buddhism was transferred from China via Korea to Japan by many people. These wall paintings have some vitality. I think it is the vitality of the story, in which Buddhism was transferred from India to China and from China to Japan.  

If you are in the room surrounded these wall paintings you might feel something tender or happiness to be there different from your usual time.

Finally, structures in Yakushiji Temple are magnificent and beautiful. A famous American historian of eastern arts, Fenorosa, in the Meiji period called the east side threefold tower in the temple which looks like a sixfold tower “an icing music”. These are appropriate structures which have the Buddhist statues above and the mural pictures above inside. The beauty of the several structures in the temple are supported by the people who have the wish to restore the appearance of the origin of Yakushiji Temple. Some structures in the temple were burned out during thirteen centuries. The people who have the relationships with the restoration have little knowledge about the detail of the original forms, so they have to decide a vast amount of details of rebuilding structures based on the forms of the existing structures and the senses of their own experience.

There is an interesting true story about the sense of beauty. The plan of rebuilding a new tower on the same place where the burned west tower had existed was activated. The fundamental idea of the rebuilding it was to build the same shaped tower with the existing east tower, but a dispute between academic professors and a head of a special group of wood carpenters for building temples and shrines who had a lot of experience occurred. At last the header’s opinion was selected. After several years when the new built tower was shown to the general public for the first time, almost all the people who looked at it were surprised. Because the height of the new tower is slightly taller than the old tower. At that time the header explained the true balance and the beauty maintaining for a long time to the people; “now the new east tower is slightly taller than the west tower ,but after five hundred years the west tower will become the same height with the east tower owing to its own weight. We will be able to look at the balanced twin towers all the way since that time”.

Yakushiji Temple is so wide that you will have many opportunities for uninterrupted concentration enough to find many of your favorite photogenic scenes.

The Love between Temmu and Jito

Temmu sent a love poem to Jito.

Beautiful you with a fragrance of violet grass,

I’ll never hate you.

If hating you I’ll never look for you

Even being aware that you are the wife of another male.

Jito sent a loving poem after the death of Temmu.

Your soul might look at the north hill of the capital.

Maybe you ask a question; do the red leaves on the hill show their beauty?

Always looking at the hill

I am very sad at night,

I am lonely in the morning,

The sleeves of my kimono never dry because of my tears.

I think the foundation of the beauty of Yakushiji Temple is the strongly tieing love between the two emperors.


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