An item for sale inside the Great Buddha Hall, Todai-ji, Nara.
My snapshots could barely begin to do justice to the Great Buddha
itself; suffice to say that it's enormous and serene and half
a dozen people could stand in the palm of its hand. The hall
is the world's largest wooden structure, and it has nifty golden
horns on top, very Indiana Jones.
In spite of this site's enormous holy significance, the atmosphere
in and around the hall is less than reverent. All kinds of kitschy
nonsense was for sale inside the temple, in addition to the
mousepads pictured above. And the Buddhist pilgrims who came
here to pray didn't seem to care about peace and quiet; kids
were running around and one lady even had her dog with her.
Also, one of the hall's mammoth support beams has a foot-wide
hole cut through it, said to represent the Buddha's nostril,
and if you can wriggle through it you get good luck. Try to
imagine a line of pilgrims and tourists waiting to wriggle through
Christ's nostril in the Cathedral of St John The Divine.
I like to read about evolution,
because it
reassures me that I'm right to find modern life to be a series
of affronts to my instincts. I haven't gotten over the basic
weirdness of being able to hop into a plane, and the same day
step out on the opposite side of the planet. Try to imagine
explaining that concept to someone a hundred years ago, much
less a thousand or ten thousand. And then try to explain that
for all the foreignness of the far side of the earth, they're
reading the same terrible suspense novels and playing the same
computer games as we are back home.
