Sanjūsangen-dō Temple

Nothing quite prepares a visitor for the inside of Sanjusangen-do. The long wooden hall in eastern Kyoto, about 120 metres from end to end, holds one thousand standing statues of Kannon, the bodhisattva of compassion, ranked in rows on tiered platforms that run the full length of the building. Each figure is life-sized, carved from Japanese cypress and covered in gold leaf, and no two are said to be exactly alike. In the dim light they merge into a single shimmering field of gold, a vision of infinite mercy made physical, and at the centre sits a larger seated Thousand-armed Kannon by the Kamakura sculptor Tankei, bringing the total to 1,001.

The temple was founded in 1164 by Taira no Kiyomori for the retired emperor Go-Shirakawa. Fire destroyed it in 1249, and the present hall was rebuilt by 1266; its name, "hall of thirty-three bays", counts the intervals between its pillars and echoes the thirty-three forms in which Kannon is said to appear. Only 124 of the standing statues survived the fire, and the rest were carved anew in the thirteenth century, so the ensemble is a collaboration of workshops across more than a century. The hall is a National Treasure of Japan.

In front of the thousand Kannon stand the twenty-eight guardian deities, many of them Hindu gods absorbed into Buddhism, carved with startling realism, and at either end the wind god Fujin with his bag of winds and the thunder god Raijin with his ring of drums, images that have become emblems of Japanese art. The exceptional length of the veranda outside gave rise to a tradition of archery: from the early seventeenth century, archers in the Toshiya contest tried to shoot as many arrows as possible along its full length. The custom lives on in a festival held on a Sunday in January, when some two thousand archers, many of them young people in kimono, compete in the temple grounds.

Getting there

Sanjusangen-do is in the Higashiyama district of Kyoto, about 4 km from the city centre and roughly 20 minutes' walk from Kyoto Station. The nearest airport is Osaka Itami International Airport (ITM), about 38 km away in a straight line. The closest railway station is Shichijo on the Keihan Line, a walk of under ten minutes along Shichijo-dori, and city buses 206 and 208 stop nearby.