Wooden Statues of Brahma (seated) and Indra (half Seated)

An Elephant Rider and a Four-Faced God in Tōji's Lecture Hall

Walk into the Lecture Hall (Kōdō) at Tōji in southern Kyoto and your eye is drawn to the edges of the great altar platform, where two figures sit apart from the rows of Buddhas and fierce kings. One is a calm young man perched sideways on the back of an elephant, a small ritual thunderbolt resting in his hand. The other faces him across the platform: a seated deity with four faces and four arms, raised on a lotus that four geese carry on their backs. These are Taishakuten and Bonten, and they have kept watch over this hall since the ninth century.

Together they form a single National Treasure, listed in Japan's registry as "Wooden Bonten Seated and Taishakuten Half-Seated, enshrined in the Lecture Hall." They are two of the twenty-one statues that make up Tōji's celebrated three-dimensional mandala, the boldest sculptural project of early Japanese esoteric Buddhism.

Brahmā and Indra, Reimagined for Esoteric Buddhism

Bonten and Taishakuten began life far from Japan, as the Hindu gods Brahmā and Indra. Buddhism absorbed them as protective deities, and they usually appear as a pair, guarding more important figures from either side. In Japanese temples built before esoteric teachings arrived, both were shown as standing figures dressed like Chinese court officials. The eighth-century examples at Tōdaiji and Tōshōdaiji look almost like dignified civil servants.

The Tōji pair breaks sharply with that older convention. Here the imagery follows esoteric Buddhist models that the monk Kūkai studied in Tang China, and the result is far more Indian in feeling. Bonten gains multiple faces and arms and a goose-borne throne; Taishakuten climbs onto an elephant and holds a vajra, the ritual implement that began as Indra's weapon. Seeing them, you are looking at a fresh visual language that had only just entered Japan.

Kūkai's Mandala You Can Walk Around

The Lecture Hall was conceived as the heart of Tōji by Kūkai (774–835), the monk known after his death as Kōbō Daishi and the founder of Shingon Buddhism in Japan. A painted mandala maps the cosmos of esoteric teaching in two dimensions. Kūkai wanted something a worshipper could stand inside, so he laid out a katsuma mandala, a mandala rendered as a group of sculptures arranged across the altar.

Twenty-one figures occupy the platform. Five Wisdom Buddhas sit at the center. To one side stand five bodhisattvas led by Kongōharamitsu; to the other, five Wisdom Kings led by Fudō Myōō, a wrathful protector then almost unknown in Japan. Around the four edges stand the Four Heavenly Kings, with Bonten and Taishakuten completing the guard at the outermost left and right. The hall was finished in 839, sixteen years after work began and four years after Kūkai himself had died.

A fire in 1486 destroyed the building along with the Buddhas at the mandala's center. The hall was rebuilt by 1491, and the central Buddhas, together with one bodhisattva, were carved anew in later centuries; these recreations are designated Important Cultural Properties. Fifteen of the twenty-one statues, however, are the originals from Kūkai's commission, and these hold the higher rank of National Treasure. Bonten and Taishakuten are among the survivors.

Why These Two Are National Treasures

The pair earned National Treasure status in 1954, having first been listed as an Important Cultural Property the year before. Their value rests on three things at once. They are among the earliest and finest sculptures of Japan's esoteric Buddhist tradition. They preserve, in wood, the new iconography Kūkai brought back from China. And they remain part of the only mandala of this kind that survives in something close to its original conception.

Both were carved chiefly from wood and once carried bright polychrome coloring, traces of which remain. Centuries of worship and the 1486 fire left their mark even on the figures that came through. Bonten's front face is original, while the side faces and the top of the head were repaired in later work. Taishakuten's body is the ninth-century original, but his head was recarved during the Kamakura period, which gives his features a slightly different mood from the rest of the early group.

What to Look for When You Stand Before Them

Bonten rewards a slow look. He has four faces, with the central one carrying a third eye on the forehead and a small extra head set above his high topknot. His four arms hold attributes and gestures rather than weapons, and one shoulder is left bare in the manner of a Buddha, with only modest bracelets and ornaments. He sits cross-legged on a lotus, and below the lotus four geese spread their wings to bear him up. The bird mount is easy to miss from a distance, so it is worth stepping close enough to pick out the necks and beaks.

Taishakuten is the figure most visitors remember. He has a single face and a single pair of arms, almost human in proportion, marked out as divine only by a third eye on the brow. He sits in a relaxed half-seated pose on his elephant, one foot drawn up and the other lowered, holding the vajra that recalls his older role as a god of war. His calm, youthful face has made him a favorite for generations; many in Japan rank him among the most handsome of all Buddhist statues. Try to view him from several angles, since the elephant lets you walk part of the way around him.

Around Tōji

Tōji is an easy stop because it sits so close to Kyoto Station, about a fifteen-minute walk from the JR station or ten minutes from Tōji Station on the Kintetsu line. The temple was founded in 796 to guard the new capital and was handed to Kūkai in 823, becoming the head training ground of Shingon Buddhism. Its grounds still follow the layout of that era, which is rare for Kyoto.

The five-story pagoda is the tallest wooden tower in Japan at about 55 meters and is itself a National Treasure, as is the Golden Hall (Kondō) nearby, which houses a large Yakushi (Medicine) Buddha. On the twenty-first of every month the precinct fills with the Kōbō-ichi market, named for the day of Kūkai's death, where roughly a thousand stalls sell antiques, old kimono, ceramics, plants, and food. If you can time a visit to that day, the temple takes on the character of a city festival.