Sculpted Pagoda Four Faced Utensil (enshrined in a Five

A Buddhist World Modeled in Clay

At the base of the great central pillar that rises through the Five-Story Pagoda of Hōryū-ji, four shadowed openings reveal something most visitors do not expect to find inside a tower. Not a single icon, but four crowded scenes, each peopled by dozens of small clay figures. They were finished in the year 711, and together they are registered as a National Treasure under the name Sozō Tōhon Shimengu, the clay tableaux set at the four sides of the pagoda.

Each face of the first story was built up with clay into a rocky, cave-like setting, an evocation of Mount Sumeru, the cosmic mountain at the center of the Buddhist world. Within these miniature grottoes, sculptors arranged groups of small figures to stage four episodes from the life and teaching of the Buddha. The pillar at the center is more than a structural support. Beneath its foundation stone lies a deposit said to hold relics of the Buddha, so the whole lowest story reads as a reliquary chamber wrapped around a sacred core.

The figures are modeled, not carved. A wooden armature was bound with straw rope and then packed with clay, a technique called sozō that allowed a suppleness of pose and expression difficult to reach in wood or bronze. Traces of pigment and gilding still cling to the surfaces. Standing only a fraction of life size, the figures draw their power from sheer number and from gesture rather than from scale.

The Only Survivor of Its Kind

The name Tōhon Shimengu is an old one. It appears in the temple's great property inventory of 747, the Hōryū-ji Garan Engi narabini Ruki Shizaichō, which carries a note recording that the clay groups were made in Wadō 4, the year corresponding to 711. That single line lets historians date the work with unusual confidence for something so ancient.

Other eighth-century temples built similar clay narratives into their pagodas. Kōfuku-ji is recorded as having Pure Land scenes in its tower, and Yakushi-ji set episodes from the Buddha's life into its eastern and western pagodas. None of those groups survives. At Yakushi-ji only fragments and pieces of armature wood remain. The Hōryū-ji tableaux are the sole example anywhere in Japan still standing in the place for which they were made, which turns them into a rare window onto how an early pagoda was meant to be experienced from within.

The group has been protected since the Meiji era. It was listed as an Important Cultural Property in 1902 and elevated to National Treasure status under the postwar cultural-properties law in 1956. Around eighty individual figures fall under the designation.

Reading the Four Faces

Walk slowly around the first story and each side stages a different episode.

The east face presents a debate. It illustrates the Vimalakirti Sutra, in which the learned layman Vimalakirti, lying ill, receives a visit from the bodhisattva Manjusri, and the two begin an exchange on emptiness and non-duality while disciples crowd in to listen. The west face turns to the aftermath of the Buddha's death, showing the division of his cremated relics, with a golden coffin and a small reliquary stupa set among the attendants. The south face looks ahead in time to Maitreya, the Buddha of the age to come.

It is the north face that draws people back for a second and third look. It depicts the Buddha's parinirvana, the moment of his passing, and the sculptors gave the surrounding disciples a grief so unguarded that the group has long been nicknamed the weeping figures of Hōryū-ji. Some press their hands to their faces; others throw their heads back, mouths open in lament. Against the calm of the reclining Buddha, that contrast becomes the emotional heart of the whole ensemble. It ranks among the earliest sustained studies of raw human feeling in all of Japanese sculpture.

Seeing this clearly takes patience. The interior is closed off, and you view the figures through wire mesh from the open doorways, at a distance and in low light. Give your eyes time to adjust. The longer you look, the more individual faces separate themselves out of the crowd.

Around the Pagoda

The pagoda stands in the West Precinct, or Sai-in, of Hōryū-ji, beside the Golden Hall, within what is often described as the oldest group of wooden buildings in the world. The wider grounds, inscribed in 1993 as part of Japan's first UNESCO World Heritage listing, reward a half-day of unhurried walking.

A combined ticket covers the West Precinct, the Great Treasure Gallery (Daihōzōin), and the East Precinct (Tō-in) around the octagonal Hall of Dreams. In the Great Treasure Gallery you can stand much closer to other early masterpieces, among them the slender Kudara Kannon and the Tamamushi Shrine. For travelers curious about where the dispersed pieces of early clay sculpture ended up, the Nara National Museum, a short train ride east, holds related fragments and mounts regular exhibitions of Buddhist art.

Hōryū-ji makes an easy day trip from Nara or Osaka. From JR Hōryūji Station it is about a twenty-minute walk, or a brief bus ride to the Hōryūji-mae stop near the main gate.