Wooden Standing Statues of the Two Heavenly Kings Brahma and

Two Heian Guardians Called Brahma and Indra at Kimii-dera

Behind the main hall of Kimii-dera, in a fireproof storehouse named the Daikomyoden, two wooden figures a little over a metre and a half tall stand side by side. They are known as Bonten and Taishakuten, the Japanese names for Brahma and Indra, two Indian deities absorbed into the Buddhist pantheon as protectors of the faith. Yet anyone who pauses in front of them will notice something that does not quite fit the labels. Neither wears the armour or the fierce expression usually given to guardian deities. Both are dressed in the soft scarves, sashes and skirts of a bodhisattva, each holding a lotus in the left hand with the right hand lowered at the side. Specialists now think the pair were most likely carved as Kannon bodhisattva images and only later came to be called Brahma and Indra.

Kimii-dera sits on the slope of Mount Nagusa on the southern edge of Wakayama City, looking out over the bay of Wakanoura. Its formal name is Kongohoji Gokokuin, and in official cultural property records the temple appears under the name Gokokuin. To most visitors it is simply Kimii-dera, the second stop on the thousand-year pilgrimage route of the thirty-three Kannon temples of western Japan. The two figures belong to a small group of Heian-period sculptures that the temple has guarded through fire, war and the upheavals of the modern era.

Why the Pair Is Designated

Both statues were recognised as national treasures under the old Law for the Preservation of Ancient Shrines and Temples on 1 August 1899, and they carry the status of Important Cultural Property under the present system. They date to the tenth or eleventh century, the middle of the Heian period.

What makes the pair interesting to historians is that the two were never meant to belong together. The figure called Brahma stands about 163.9 centimetres tall and is the plainer of the two, carved in a single block in a simple manner that echoes the temple's other Eleven-headed Kannon image. The figure called Indra, about 161.2 centimetres tall, is worked with greater refinement: the folds of the robe are cut more finely, and a surprising amount of the original pigment survives, including large rosette patterns scattered across the skirt and the crown. The two were carved from different woods and in clearly different hands. Because of this, scholars read them not as a matched set but as two separate Heian images brought together in later centuries and given the convenient names of a guardian pair.

That history of reassignment is part of their value. Many provincial temples lost the records that once explained who their oldest images were, and statues were rehoused, renamed and recombined as halls burned and were rebuilt. The two figures at Kimii-dera are a clear case where the carving itself, rather than the name attached to it, tells the more reliable story.

What to Look For When You Visit

Since the autumn of 2023 the temple has kept four of its older images on regular view in the Daikomyoden, the storehouse directly behind the main hall. The two figures discussed here are among them, shown alongside a second Eleven-headed Kannon and a standing Bishamonten. Stand close and compare the surfaces. On the Indra figure the faded reds and the ring-shaped floral motifs hint at how vivid these images once were, while the Brahma figure has lost almost all of its colour and reads as bare wood, its appeal lying in the quiet bulk of the body.

The temple's secret main image, an Eleven-headed Kannon believed to date from the early tenth century, is shown only once every fifty years; the last opening was in 2020, so the next is not expected until around 2070. The companion Senju Kannon follows the same rule. The two figures here, by contrast, can be met on an ordinary day, which makes them an unusually approachable way to stand in front of genuine Heian sculpture.

Reaching the temple is part of the experience. From the great gate a stone stairway of more than two hundred steps climbs the hillside, and the higher you go the wider the view over the sea opens behind you. The grounds also hold a Muromachi-period pagoda of 1449 and a separate modern hall containing a gilded Kannon over eleven metres high. One of the cherry trees here is the official reference tree used to declare the start of the blossom season in the Kansai region, so a spring visit carries a small extra significance.