Todaiji

Quick facts

Address

406-1 Zoshicho, Nara

Spiritual entities

Vairocana (毘盧遮那佛, Birojana)

About this place

Todaiji, in Nara, is the head temple of the Kegon school. In 743 Emperor Shōmu issued the edict for the making of the Great Vairocana Buddha at the Shigaraki palace. Its wish was put in one phrase: that all things, the moving and the growing alike, may flourish. The body of the buddha was cast in the tenth month of 749, and a great eye-opening ceremony was held in the fourth month of 752.

Origin and history

By the temple’s own history, Emperor Shōmu issued the edict for the making of the Great Vairocana Buddha in 743, at the Shigaraki palace. Its purpose was expressed as the flourishing of all things animate and growing — a wish for the Kegon world in which all things interpenetrate without obstruction.

The body of the buddha was cast in the tenth month of 749, and the great eye-opening ceremony was performed in the fourth month of 752.

What it is locally associated with

• OriginProtection & Safety

  An edict for everything alive

  The edict of 743 stated its purpose as the flourishing of all things, the moving and the growing alike.

  documented history

• Origin

  Nine years from edict to eye-opening

  The body of the buddha was cast in the tenth month of 749, and the eye-opening ceremony was held in the fourth month of 752.

  documented history

• Power spot

  Wishing for the Kegon world

  The temple records that the edict’s wish was for the Kegon world, in which all things interpenetrate without obstruction.

  documented history

What is prayed for at this temple survives in a state document, with a date on it. The edict of 743 gave the reason for making the Great Buddha in one phrase: that all things, the moving and the growing, may flourish. What was to be protected was not the emperor and not the capital — it was everything alive.

Few founding documents anywhere cast their prayer that wide. And the prayer was actually cast, in gilt bronze: the body in 749, the eyes opened in 752. Nine years from edict to eye-opening — a temple where the wish written in a document became a statue fifteen metres high.

Related guides

• How to visit a shrine or temple in JapanThe country-wide basics: purifying at the water basin, the two-bows-two-claps-one-bow form at shrines, and what temples do instead.
• What a "power spot" actually isA modern Japanese coinage, not a traditional religious category. Where the word came from, what it does and does not claim, and why this site uses it anyway.
• Shrine or temple?A shrine is Shinto and a temple is Buddhist, and you can usually tell at the gate. Why the line is cleaner on paper than on the ground, and what a government order in 1868 has to do with it.
• Omamori, ema, omikuji and goshuinThe four things you are most likely to receive, write, draw or be given at a shrine or temple, what each is actually for, and the one of them people most often get wrong.

Sources

1. 奈良時代 — 東大寺の歴史 — Todaiji (accessed 2026-08-13)