Todai-ji Temple

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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

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