Todai-ji Temple

By -
We quickly moved on to Todai-ji Temple, which is also part of the UNESCO world heritage site and another one of the The scale of this temple was something.  

 Here is a picture of the main gate:

I will just say, the main temple is HUGE.  It is also very distinctive with the golden horns on the top.  I have made this picture bigger than usual, so you can see that the little dots are actually people.  We read that this is the largest wooden structure in the world and the world's largest gilded Buddha.  At one point there were additional buildings on the left and right side that got destroyed making the building even larger!

They did actually let us take pictures inside the shrine, which was relatively rare.



Picture for scale!  These are the size of the petals at the bottom of the statue

You might wonder what this picture is for.  Belief is that if you can fit through this hole in this pillar, you will have luck for life.  It was a little unclear how this belief started.  Needless to say that every school child in the shrine pushed themselves through this hole!  It looks like it gets pretty tight in the shoulder region relatively quickly!

Such a beautiful shrine.  We had a great visit!  The ding on this temple was the lack of signage in English.  There was basically nothing written that was not in Japanese.  We  were grateful that our guidebook (and Wikipedia) had such great descriptions!

 Time in temple: 1.5  hr
Times visited: 1
Overall: A-
Location: 406-1 Zoshicho, Nara, Nara Prefecture 630-8211, Japan

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cincinnati Art Museum

By -
Image
A couple of weekends ago, I dashed into the Cincinnati Art Museum to see the Treasures of the Spanish World exhibit.  The exhibit was created by the Hispanic Society and very c learly, the descriptions were written by the Hispanic Society.  The exhibit spanned the typical exhibit hall and then also one of the other halls sometimes used for exhibit too.   With my annual membership, I had free admission to the exhibit. The exhibits starts much further back than expected, which if I had read the description closely, I would have known.  It focuses on the holistic Iberian peninsula.  The exhibit is set up chronologically and has a mixture of art mediums.  The exhibit had descriptions of the art in both English and Spanish.  As i mentioned earlier, the descriptions were definitely written by the Hispanic Society as a few of them were quite complimentary about their collection and its possessions.   So I did end up taking a bunch of photos during the exhibit. A miniature of a cr
Read more

lower east side tenement museum

By -
to take advantage of the beautiful day in new york city, i thought i would try to take the lower east side tenement museum walking tour. i hustled down there and got there right in the nick of time. i have been to the lower east side museum for their tenement tours, but wanted to try this 1 1/2 hr walking tour, immigrant soles: a neighborhood walking tour . i saw some areas of the lower east side which i had never seen before. the tour guide was very good; he did a great job pointing out the interesting architecture making us think about what certain architecture features might mean. for example, a building with only three windows, what does that mean? answer: that it was meant to have a single family live there as opposed to twenty, since there was no partition splitting the building in two. he also brought up some of the different political tensions running through the LES that had not been mentioned in some of the other tours. perfect for a beautiful summer day. times v
Read more

Morgan Library

By -
Image
I was in a suburb of New York City two weeks ago and had to get to the Morgan Library .  It has been a number of years since I have been able to make it there and it is probably my favorite place in New York.  This aptly was visit #10! It is peaceful and full of light in the museum.  It was busy in there, but still quiet.  I continue to love how elegantly the museum meshed contemporary with the traditional elements. Not sure if you can see it, but the grates are full of birds I focused on my visit on three major exhibits: John Singer Sargent: Portraits in Charcoal , Verdi: Creating Otello and Falstaff-Highlights from the Ricordi Archives , and the main library wing . I really like the John Singer Sargent oil painting portraits.  He is quite well known for these paintings that he completed in the early portion of the 1900s including many of the souls and their children.  He painted so many famous people of that time period.  He ended up switching to charcoal because it was f
Read more