Hōryū-ji

← Encyclopedia

Hōryū-ji is a Buddhist temple at Ikaruga, southwest of Nara, whose oldest buildings are the oldest surviving wooden structures in the world. Founded in the early seventh century, in the first generation after Buddhism reached Japan from the Korean kingdoms, it preserves a cluster of timber halls that have stood for some thirteen centuries — long enough that the building methods, the joinery, and the proportions are themselves primary evidence for an architecture otherwise known only from later copies and from ruins on the Asian mainland.

Tradition assigns the foundation to 607 and credits it to Prince Shōtoku, the regent later revered as the patron who established Buddhism in Japan, together with the empress Suiko. The Nihon Shoki, the eighth-century court chronicle, records that the temple burned in 670. For decades scholars argued over whether the standing halls predate or postdate that fire; excavation in the twentieth century settled the matter by uncovering the foundations of an earlier, differently aligned temple nearby. The present Western Precinct — the central gate, the great hall or kondō, and the five-storey pagoda set within a roofed cloister — was therefore raised after 670, in the late seventh or early eighth century, on a fresh plan. It is old beyond any rival, but not quite as old as the legend wants.

The kondō houses some of the finest early Buddhist art in East Asia: a gilt-bronze Shakyamuni triad cast in 623 and inscribed in memory of Shōtoku, the lacquered Tamamushi Shrine with its painted panels, and, in a separate hall, the tall willowy figure called the Kudara Kannon. These objects let the temple double as a museum of the Asuka and early Nara periods, when Japanese Buddhism was still visibly continuous with its continental sources — the styles look back to sixth-century China and to Paekche in Korea, the route by which the religion and its craftsmen had come.

For the monks and pilgrims who maintained it, Hōryū-ji was never a relic but a working monastery and a site of merit, and it remains an active temple of the Shōtoku sect today. Its survival owes something to deliberate conservation and something to fortune: the halls escaped the wars and fires that destroyed most of their contemporaries, though a 1949 fire damaged the kondō murals and prompted the modern Japanese laws protecting cultural property. UNESCO inscribed the temple and its surroundings as a World Heritage Site in 1993. What the buildings chiefly carry is duration — the demonstration that wood, jointed and tended, can outlast the stone of nearly everything built around it.

→ Related: Shwedagon Pagoda · Newar Vajrayana