Great Buddha of Kamakura

Interesting facts

The face alone is 2.35 metres long, each eye about a metre wide, and each ear 1.9 metres long.

From knee to knee the seated figure measures 9.1 metres, and its thumb is 85 centimetres round.

The body was cast in seven separate pours, each new section built up on the last inside a growing mound of earth.

The window still visible on the Buddha's back is the opening through which the inner clay core was dug out after casting.

The base was once ringed by 32 bronze lotus petals, of which only four survive.

Kipling's verses on the statue open his 1901 novel Kim, and the full poem appeared in his 1903 collection The Five Nations.

In the mid-Edo period the monks Yūten and Yōkoku sponsored a restoration that revived the temple around the open-air statue.

The 1960–61 works reinforced the neck and added a device to help the statue withstand earthquakes.

The American painter John La Farge painted the Buddha in watercolour in 1887, and Charles W. Bartlett made a woodblock print of it in 1916.

Why it is worth it

The Great Buddha of Kamakura sits in the open air in the grounds of Kōtoku-in temple, a bronze Amida Buddha more than thirteen metres high including its base and weighing about 121 tonnes. He is shown seated in meditation, head slightly bowed, and the long, gentle slope of the shoulders gives the whole figure a quality of complete stillness. Around him are trees; above him, only sky. Look closely by the ears and you can still find traces of the gold leaf that once covered the bronze.

The statue was not meant to sit outdoors. A first, wooden Buddha was finished in 1243 thanks to the fund-raising of the priest Jōkō of Tōtōmi and Lady Inada no Tsubone, but it was damaged by a storm in 1248, and in 1252 casting of the bronze replacement began, probably under the craftsmen Ōno Gorōemon or Tanji Hisatomo. It sat inside a great hall, which storms battered in 1334 and again in 1369; the last hall was swept away by the tsunami that followed the Nankai earthquake of 1498. Since then the Buddha has remained under open sky, which makes him unusual among Japan's great Buddha statues.

The figure is hollow, and visitors may step inside and look at the bronze from within — a rare chance to understand how medieval Japanese founders built something so large. The 1923 Great Kantō earthquake destroyed the base, which was repaired in 1925, and the statue underwent major restorations in 1960–61 and again in 2016.

The Buddha is a National Treasure of Japan, and it moved Rudyard Kipling to write a poem about it in 1892. Kamakura itself is a seaside town of temples tucked into green valleys; Hase-dera temple is only about five minutes' walk away, and hiking trails lead off into the hills.

Getting there

Kōtoku-in is in Kamakura, about 1 km from the centre, and roughly a seven-minute walk from Hase Station on the Enoshima Electric Railway (Enoden), three stops from Kamakura Station. Tokyo Haneda Airport (HND) is about 35 km away.

Great Buddha of Kamakura

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

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