Yakushi-ji: The Temple Written Back into Place

Paper offered for a special copying programme at Yakushi-ji contains fragments of the temple itself. Small pieces removed while repairing the East Pagoda's damaged central pillar were incorporated into the paper. Participants copy the Shari Wasan, a hymn praising the Buddha's relics, and dedicate their writing to the pagoda. The completed sheets are placed on its second level.^[1]

Wood that could no longer serve in the same way as part of a structural member thus returns in a different form. It becomes a surface for devotion. The programme joins maintenance of an ancient building to an activity through which people can support it, rather than leaving the connection at a payment for repairs.

This small material circuit belongs to a much larger history. Since 1968, Yakushi-ji has linked the copying of Buddhist texts to the reconstruction of its precinct. Handwritten offerings helped bring back the Main Hall and West Pagoda, while the surviving East Pagoda required a different kind of work.^[2]

The two towers now participate in a paired composition, but they are not two equivalent survivals. One is ancient fabric repeatedly maintained; the other is a modern reconstruction of a lost building. The writing campaign helps explain how those different histories came to occupy the same religious landscape.

Yakushi-ji's founding story begins away from its present Nara precinct. In 680, Emperor Tenmu vowed to establish a temple while his consort, the future Empress Jitō, was ill. The first foundation stood in the area of the later Fujiwara capital. Jitō carried the project forward after Tenmu's death. The archaeological site known as Moto-Yakushi-ji, in Kashihara, belongs to that beginning.^[3]

The institution's establishment at Heijō-kyō, the capital at Nara, is dated to 718 in its transmitted chronology. That does not mean that a finished monastery was simply dismantled elsewhere and reassembled here. The distinction can be tested in one of the buildings that survived: the East Pagoda.^[4]

A study published by the Nara National Research Institute for Cultural Properties in 2017 examined its wooden members. Two boards retaining their outer bark had final growth rings dated to 729 and 730. Their position at the outside of the trees made them especially useful for identifying when the timber had been cut. The researchers also dated a surviving ring in the lower central pillar to 719, but that member did not preserve the tree's outermost ring, so 719 was not treated as its felling date.^[5]

The results support construction at the Nara site, using timber obtained after the institutional move. They are consistent at the level of the year with the traditional completion date of 730. The East Pagoda was not simply an older tower carried intact from the former capital.

This matters to the modern precinct because its oldest standing tower already records an act of renewal in a different place. Continuity of the temple's name, religious purpose, and patronage did not require every building to make the same journey. The ancient institution itself had acquired a new architectural setting.

The East Pagoda has three principal storeys, though its alternating large and small roofs produce six visible roof levels. The smaller roofs are mokoshi, additional sheltered eaves below the main roofs, not three extra storeys. This repetition makes the tower's arrangement recognizable even before its age is known.^[6]

Its western partner had once balanced it across the precinct. That tower was lost in the fire of 1528 and remained absent for more than four centuries. The West Pagoda now standing was completed in 1981. Its renewed colour belongs to an intentional reconstruction, rather than to the sudden cleaning of an ancient tower that had somehow escaped notice.^[7]

Between the ancient foundation and the modern campaign, the temple had not simply ceased to exist. The Main Hall also suffered in 1528, but subsequent rebuilding maintained a place for its images. A much smaller later hall preceded the monumental building reconstructed in 1976. Inside the new hall, the ancient bronze triad centres on the seated Yakushi, the Healing Buddha, accompanied by Nikkō and Gakkō, the Sunlight and Moonlight bodhisattvas.^[8]

These unequal survivals defined the rebuilding task. A lost tower needed a new building if its place in the ensemble was to be restored. An ancient tower needed its surviving material maintained. Sacred images that had endured could occupy a new setting without becoming modern sculptures themselves.

Calling all this “restoration” conceals the separate decisions. Yakushi-ji's present symmetry combines replacement of absence with care for survival. The modern campaign did not make both towers the same age. It made their relationship visible again, while leaving different obligations on either side of the courtyard.

Takada Kōin, the temple's chief priest, began the modern copying campaign in 1968. According to Yakushi-ji's account, its initial target was one million copied texts, each associated with an offering of one thousand yen at the time. The invitation joined a contribution towards building work to the participant's own writing. The temple records the target as achieved when the reconstructed Main Hall was consecrated in 1976.^[2]

The unit is important. A million manuscripts are not necessarily the work of a million different people. Someone may make repeated offerings; a count of texts does not provide a census of supporters. Nor does multiplying the stated offering by the target produce an audited construction budget. What the account establishes is the form in which the temple organized and described its appeal.

The copied text gave the contribution a task and an object. A supporter did something that could be completed away from the construction site, then placed the result in the temple's care. The work of a carpenter and the writing of a donor remained different activities, but the campaign connected them through a common undertaking.

That connection did not depend solely on people coming to Nara. The temple's chronology records the exhibition of its Moonlight Bodhisattva at the Mitsukoshi department store in Tokyo's Nihonbashi district in 1971, shortly after the Main Hall groundbreaking. A dedicated copying hall followed at Yakushi-ji in 1972, and a copying hall at its Tokyo branch in 1975.^[9]

These were different means of extending the institution's reach. An image could travel beyond its normal precinct; a branch could provide a place for participation elsewhere. The rebuilding site remained in Nara while some of the activity connected with it acquired other locations.

The completed Main Hall gave the campaign a visible result. Its history also leaves a more particular question. What became of the enormous body of writing through which the appeal had been organized? The answer is part of the building, not an administrative afterthought.

The reconstructed Main Hall includes storage for copied scriptures in its upper part. Beneath that storage, the ancient bronze images occupy the sanctuary. The structure therefore houses both the objects that sustained the temple's earlier religious life and offerings associated with its modern rebuilding.^[8]

Yakushi-ji's published copying instructions explain the continuing arrangement in practical terms. A participant can trace a supplied model, work at home, or share the copying with family members. A space at the end allows a wish, gratitude, or repentance to be expressed. After submission, the temple describes offerings before Yakushi, services, and eventual storage in bundles of a thousand. It undertakes to care for the texts for as long as the temple continues.^[10]

The published invitation does not restrict participation to members of Yakushi-ji's own Buddhist school. It asks for a copied offering without requiring an existing sectarian affiliation.^[10]

These are the institution's current instructions, not proof that every procedural detail was identical in 1968. They nevertheless show how the manuscript and the offering remain connected after construction. A completed sheet is not returned as a souvenir of having helped. It becomes something the temple accepts responsibility for keeping.

This creates a different relationship from paying to see a finished building. A visitor can leave with no continuing claim on a room. A dedicated manuscript occupies space after its writer has gone. The campaign accumulates objects whose religious purpose includes remaining in the institution's care.

The storage above the sanctuary gives that obligation an architectural expression. The new hall shelters the products of the activity that helped bring it into existence. Building and copying are joined twice: first through support for construction, then through the continuing accommodation of the written offerings.

The contents also prevent the hall from being understood solely as a reconstruction of an eighth-century exterior. Its modern history is physically inside it. The old images and new manuscripts do not need to be the same age to belong to the same temple. Their relationship is one of the things the rebuilt hall was made to sustain.

The money and manuscripts could support construction, but they could not determine the vanished buildings' dimensions. Archaeological investigation supplied that evidence. At the West Pagoda, excavation distinguished the central support stone, still in its original position, from two other foundation stones that had been moved after the 1528 fire. A stone's survival did not guarantee that it still marked the original plan.^[11]

Rebuilding also required a way to protect what had been found. The new West Pagoda was carried on reinforced-concrete piles and connecting beams, while its reconstructed platform was placed about eighty centimetres above the old one. This arrangement allowed the surviving platform and surrounding remains to be retained below the new work.^[11]

The modern tower consequently does not reproduce an ancient building in every concealed detail. Its visible relationship with the East Pagoda is one achievement; its protective separation from the excavated remains is another. The old foundation was evidence for the reconstruction without being required to carry the new tower in precisely its former way.

This complicates a simple choice between rebuilding and preserving ruins. Here the project brought them into a deliberately layered arrangement. The new building gave the missing tower a presence above ground. Below, the archaeological remains continued to preserve material that could not be supplied merely by making an accurate-looking new tower.

A paired outline was only part of what had been lost. The ancient pagodas contained clay scenes from the Buddha's life. Fragments survive, and the temple's historical account describes a sequence of eight phases. Those traces supplied a basis for renewing the subject, but not a complete set of ancient sculptures ready to be put back in place.^[12]

The modern sculptor Nakamura Shinya created new ensembles for the two towers. Four scenes installed in the West Pagoda in 2015 concern the later part of the Buddha's life, from enlightenment through teaching, death, and the division of his relics. Four scenes of the earlier life followed in the East Pagoda in 2023.^[12][13]

The dates separate this work from the completion of the West Pagoda in 1981. A building could be standing long before the renewed sculptural programme was complete. Restoring the architectural pair and furnishing it with a linked religious narrative were successive undertakings.

The choice of subject also explains why the towers cannot be reduced to symmetrical markers in a courtyard. The story leads towards the Buddha's death and the treatment of his relics, making the reliquary character of a pagoda part of what its images teach. The episodes ask the pair to carry a religious account as well as a balanced roofline.

Nakamura's sculptures belong to the twenty-first century. They renew an earlier programme through new artistic work rather than claiming to be recovered ancient figures. That distinction leaves room for both the evidence of the fragments and the responsibility of a living artist. The surviving pieces tell something about what was lost; the new ensembles provide something the fragmented material cannot itself do again.

The writing campaign works through a related act of renewal. Its participants make new copies of inherited texts. The value of their offering does not depend on disguising the paper as ancient. Likewise, the new scenes can belong to the temple's religious continuity while remaining plainly the work of a later generation.

The East Pagoda's major dismantling repair began in 2009 and was completed on 15 February 2021. The installation of its new sculptures in 2023 was a later event. Keeping those dates separate shows that maintaining the ancient structure and renewing its religious furnishings did not end at the same moment.^[6][12]

The copying paper containing fragments of the central pillar joins the two activities at a smaller scale. The pillar had required repair; removed wood was no longer performing its former structural task. Incorporated into paper, it could return with writing dedicated to the Buddha and be deposited within the tower. The temple presents this as a special religious connection with the repaired pagoda.^[1]

The material's continuity is real but limited. A sheet containing wood fragments does not replace the repaired pillar. Its work is devotional, not load-bearing. The programme gives removed material another use while attaching that use to support for the building from which it came.

It also extends the temple's responsibility to its supporters. Their contributions help sustain the precinct, but the resulting texts ask for continuing care after a repair or dedication ceremony is over. The institution receives both resources and things to keep. Completion of construction opens another period of custody rather than dissolving the relationship.

This is what gives Yakushi-ji's reconstructed precinct a history beyond the recovery of a silhouette. Its ancient East Pagoda, new West Pagoda, surviving images, modern sculptures, and stored manuscripts enter the institution by different routes. Excavation, carpentry, artistic commission, and devotional writing cannot substitute for one another. The campaign brings their results together without making them historically identical.

The Main Hall and western tower were built back into a composition whose eastern tower had endured. The manuscripts remain within the religious institution they helped sustain. At Yakushi-ji, the invitation to rebuild did not end with asking people to contribute towards something they could later see. It also offered a place for something they had made to remain.