Through Uji to Nara
temples, as their rules provide, have been rebuilt every twenty years, the original buildings being exactly duplicated each time, so that, in their freshness and perfect repair, they look now as they did a thousand years ago. The Buddhist shrines have been burned, rebuilt, half abandoned at times; and in recent years, since their lands were taken from them and their revenues withheld, have suffered seriously. The largest image of Buddha is the Nara Dai Butsu. The seated deity, 63 feet in height, was set upon his lotus pedestal in 749, and once the head of the statue fell off and was broken, and twice the temple burned and melted it. The temple enshrining the bronze deity is now dilapidated, and the huge corner beams and brackets of the roof are braced with timbers, so that an earthquake would be likely to overset the holy place.
The great two-storied gate way of the Dai Butsu temple has stood for eleven centuries and more, and is a picturesque, weather-beaten old structure, apparently strong enough to resist the assaults of another thousand years. Colossal Nio, with hideous countenances, stand on guard in niches, and within is a large green court-yard, and a closed gallery on the two sides that connect the gate-way with the temple—the cloister of a European cathedral. A huge bronze lantern, one of the earliest examples of such work, is said to have long contained the sacred fire brought from Ceylon. The great Buddha itself is disappointing, because seen too near. The face is sixteen feet long and over nine feet wide, and the expression is not calm, soulful, and meditative, as Buddha in Nirvana should be, but heavy and stolid, with a hard, unmeditative stare. The gilding with which the statue was once covered has worn away with time, leaving it as dark and blackened as befits its Hottentot countenance. On the great halo are images six and eight feet high that look like pygmies.
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