Asuka-dera

Asuka-dera is a Buddhist temple in the village of Asuka in Nara Prefecture. It was built between 588 and 596 by Soga no Umako, the most powerful minister of the Yamato court, and is considered Japan’s first Buddhist temple with a full set of monastery buildings. Its early names were Hōkō-ji (“temple where the Dharma flourishes”) and Gangō-ji; people also simply called it Asuka-dera, “the temple of Asuka”.

Buddhist worship and smaller religious buildings preceded Asuka-dera: the Nihon Shoki records that Umako put up a pagoda in 585. Asuka-dera marked a new scale of temple construction, a planned complex combining a pagoda that held relics of the Buddha, image halls, a lecture hall and roofed corridors, built of large timbers on stone foundations with tiled roofs.

Most of the original temple disappeared long ago. What survives on the site is a small hall, rebuilt in the Edo period on the site of the central golden hall, and inside it the bronze Asuka Great Buddha. Around it, archaeologists have traced the foundations of the original buildings under the fields.

Buddhism began in India in the fifth century BCE and spread through Central Asia to China and then to the kingdoms of the Korean peninsula. From Baekje, in south-western Korea, it reached Japan. According to the Nihon Shoki (Chronicles of Japan), King Seong of Baekje sent a gilt-bronze image of Shaka (the Buddha), banners and sutras to the Yamato ruler Kinmei. The Chronicles date this to 552; the Jōgū Shōtoku Hōō teisetsu and the Gangō-ji engi give 538.

The Yamato court was divided. The Soga clan, which worked closely with immigrant specialists, wanted to accept the new faith; the Mononobe and Nakatomi clans, tied to the worship of the native gods (kami), warned that the gods would be angry. When an epidemic broke out, the opponents blamed Buddhism and threw the image into the Naniwa canal. The quarrel ended in 587, when Soga no Umako and his allies defeated Mononobe no Moriya in battle.

Private Buddhist practice may have come even earlier. The much later Fusō ryakki (twelfth century) preserves a tradition that an immigrant named Shiba Tatto, grandfather of the sculptor Tori, worshipped a Buddhist image in Yamato in 522; this is not a contemporary record of the event. After 587, Umako could build a temple on a scale never seen before, and Asuka-dera was the result.

The Chronicles give an unusually detailed building record. In 588 Baekje sent Buddhist relics, monks and a team of specialists: two temple carpenters, one master of the cast metal finial at the top of the pagoda (roban hakase, 鑪盤博士), four tile masters (kawara hakase, 瓦博士) and one painter. The house of Konoha, ancestor of the Asuka no Kinunui no Miyatsuko, was pulled down to make room for the temple. In 590 workers went into the mountains to cut timber; in 592 the Buddha hall and covered galleries were raised; in 593 relics of the Buddha were placed in the foundation stone of the pagoda’s central pillar, and the pillar was raised; in 596 the temple was declared complete, and Umako’s son Zentoku was made its administrator.

The same year, two foreign monks began to live there: Hyeja (Japanese: Eji) from Goguryeo, who had arrived in 595, and Hyechong (Esō) from Baekje. The Chronicles call the two “the mainstay of the Three Treasures”. Hyeja was also the Buddhist teacher of Prince Shōtoku, so Asuka-dera was a meeting place for the court, immigrant craftsmen and monks from two Korean kingdoms.

Roof tiles are the best evidence of Baekje’s role. The Encyclopedia of Korean Culture explains that the tile master was a Baekje title for specialist tile makers, that their arrival brought tiled roofs to Japanese temple building, and that it turned makers of Sue-ware pottery into tile makers. The lotus-pattern eave tiles of Asuka-dera, with round or pointed petal tips, follow designs popular in Baekje, and Japanese archaeologists note their similarity to tiles found at Buyeo, the Baekje capital.

Excavations by the Nara National Research Institute for Cultural Properties in 1956–57 revealed an unusual plan. A pagoda stood at the centre. Around it were three golden halls (kondō): one to the east, one to the west and one to the north, the northern one on the main axis. A roofed corridor enclosed this group, with the middle gate to the south and a lecture hall behind the corridor to the north; the whole temple precinct measured about 300 by 200 metres. This “one pagoda, three golden halls” plan is not found in later Japanese temples and differs from the usual Baekje plan of one pagoda and one hall in a line, seen for example at Jeongnimsa in Buyeo.

The central position of the pagoda gave the relics of the Buddha a prominent architectural place, surrounded by the image halls. Later temples used a variety of other arrangements; Kawara-dera in Asuka, built in the mid-seventh century, for example, had one pagoda and two golden halls. These examples show diversity rather than a single sequence that every temple followed.

Japanese and Korean scholars have compared the three-hall layout with the Goguryeo temple site of Cheongam-ri near Pyongyang, which has an octagonal pagoda surrounded by halls on three sides; the Asuka Village cultural property office calls the two plans strikingly similar, and the Encyclopedia of Korean Culture describes Asuka-dera’s plan as showing Goguryeo influence. Other features point to Baekje: the eastern and western halls stood on two-tier platforms with small column-base stones on the lower tier, a building type with parallels at Jeongnimsa in Buyeo, and the tiles are closely related to Baekje tiles. The similarity with Cheongam-ri supports discussion of links with Goguryeo architecture, but it does not show who supplied the design.

In 605, according to the Chronicles, Empress Suiko ordered two jōroku (丈六, “sixteen-shaku”) Buddha images, one of bronze and one of embroidery, with Kuratsukuri no Tori as their maker, and the king of Goguryeo sent 300 ryō of gold to help. The bronze Shaka (Śākyamuni) was installed in the golden hall in 606, according to the Nihon Shoki; the inscription text known as the Jōroku kōmei, preserved in the Gangō-ji engi, gives 609. The Chronicles say that the image was taller than the hall door, and that Tori found a way to bring it in without breaking the door. Tori came from a family of saddle makers descended from the immigrant Shiba Tatto, and later, in 623, he made the Shaka Triad of Hōryū-ji, whose inscription names him.

The seated Buddha is about 2.75 m high. It has suffered greatly: the temple burned after a lightning strike in 1196, and the statue was repaired many times. Standard accounts hold that only parts of the face and three fingers of the right hand are original. One alternative view holds that Tori’s images stood in the eastern and western halls and are now lost, while the surviving image from the central hall was made by another sculptor. In 2012, however, X-ray fluorescence analysis by Waseda University found no clear difference in metal composition between the parts thought to be original and those thought to be repairs, and the researchers suggested that much more of the body may date from the Asuka period. How much is original is therefore still debated. Even so, because it has stayed in the same place for over 1,400 years, it is treasured as one of Japan’s oldest large Buddha images.

Its style, where it survives (the long face, almond-shaped eyes and faint smile), resembles the Tori style of the Hōryū-ji triad, which art historians trace back to Buddhist sculpture of the Northern Wei in China, transmitted via the Korean peninsula.

For the Soga and the court, a temple was at once a religious foundation, a political statement and a technological showcase. Buddhism promised merit for the patron and his ancestors, healing from illness and protection for the state. The Chronicles connect temple building with vows made in times of danger: Umako vowed to build a temple if he defeated the Mononobe, just as Prince Shōtoku vowed to build a temple for the Four Heavenly Kings (Shitennō-ji) in the same campaign.

A tiled hall on stone foundations towering over the Asuka valley also displayed power in a new language. For three centuries Japanese elites had shown their status by building great burial mounds, and the large keyhole-shaped tombs went out of use around the end of the sixth century, just as temples appeared. Temples did not simply replace tombs, but they became a new way to display power: a permanent complex where monks performed rituals for the living and the dead. By 624, according to the Chronicles, there were 46 temples in Japan, with 816 monks and 569 nuns.

Finally, temple construction brought together religious knowledge and specialised building technologies. The Asuka-Fujiwara World Heritage council describes the temples’ technologies in civil engineering, architecture, surveying, roofing and metalworking as a foundation of Japan’s nation-building, which later culminated in planned capitals such as Fujiwara-kyō and Heijō-kyō.

Asuka-dera was part of a wave of temple building across East Asia. In Baekje, King Wideok had a temple built at Buyeo in 577 for a dead prince; a reliquary inscribed with that date was found in 2007 in the pagoda foundation of the Wangheungsa site. The History of the Three Kingdoms (Samguk sagi), by contrast, records the founding of Wangheungsa in 600 and its completion in 634. Baekje’s capital, Sabi, had been established by King Seong, the king whom the Chronicles credit with sending Buddhism to Japan. In Silla, Buddhism had been officially accepted in the 520s, after the martyrdom of Ichadon.

In China, the Sui dynasty reunited the country in 589, the year after Asuka-dera was begun. Its founder, Emperor Wen (Yang Jian), also laid institutional foundations, such as new law codes, that the Tang dynasty later built on.

These developments in Korea and China were directly relevant to Asuka-dera. Baekje sent the builders, tile makers and monks who helped establish the temple, while its pagoda and relic deposit belonged to a wider East Asian pattern of Buddhist patronage. The temple’s construction shows how the Yamato court drew on skills and religious practices circulating between neighbouring kingdoms, then put them to work in a new Japanese setting.

Asuka-dera stood at the centre of court life in the seventh century. According to the Nihon Shoki, it was at a ball game under the keyaki tree of this temple that Prince Naka no Ōe first met Nakatomi no Kamatari, and in the coup of 645 Naka no Ōe occupied and fortified the temple against the Soga. In 680, when the court ended official administration for most temples, it kept Asuka-dera under official administration because it had always been a great temple administered by officials and had rendered good service; it was counted among the four great temples of the Asuka region.

When the capital moved to Heijō-kyō (Nara) in 710, the temple’s institution followed: in 718 Gangō-ji was established in the new capital, where it became one of the great temples of Nara. The original temple continued as Moto-Gangō-ji (本元興寺, the original Gangō-ji). It recovered in the ninth century, but after a lightning fire in 1196 destroyed the pagoda and the golden hall it declined rapidly.

The present small main hall was rebuilt in the 1820s, late in the Edo period, and the temple, now called Angoin, belongs to the Buzan branch of the Shingon school. The site was designated a National Historic Site in 1966. The Asuka-dera Temple Site is component part 005 of the World Heritage property “Ancient Capitals of Asuka and Fujiwara”, inscribed in 2026.

The excavations of 1956–57 established the three-hall layout, traced the corridors, gates and the earthen walls of the precinct, and reached the pagoda’s foundation stone, a granite slab about 2.4 m square lying about 3 m below the present ground surface, with a rectangular cavity for relics. The pagoda and central hall stood on platforms faced with dressed stone, while the eastern and western halls had two-tier platforms with additional column-base stones on the lower tier.

Excavations recovered armour scales, horse gear, earrings, knives and beads associated with the pagoda’s foundation. Some, such as the armour scales and horse gear at the corners of the foundation stone, remained where they had been placed at the founding; others came from the fill of a pit dug in 1197, after the fire, when the relics were taken out, or from a stone box in which part of the relics and offerings were reburied at that time. These objects are of the same kinds found in kofun burial mounds, and their similarity to grave goods helps scholars examine continuities between older elite practices and Buddhist ritual. Asuka-dera thus stands at the meeting point of the Kofun period and the Buddhist Asuka period.

Recent research has continued to refine the history of the site and of the Great Buddha. Whatever the final verdict on how much of the statue is original, the Great Buddha has become a case study in how damaged objects carry memory across centuries.

The date of Buddhism’s arrival is the first point of disagreement. The Nihon Shoki gives 552; the Jōgū Shōtoku Hōō teisetsu and the Gangō-ji engi give 538. Many Japanese historians now regard 538 as more likely. Others stress that both dates are uncertain and that private worship by immigrants may have begun earlier, as the much later tradition about Shiba Tatto suggests.

Accounts differ in emphasis rather than in evidence. The Encyclopedia of Korean Culture stresses that Asuka-dera was built by Baekje craftsmen, housed Goguryeo and Baekje monks and received Goguryeo gold, making it a key monument for understanding how Korean Buddhist culture reached ancient Japan. Japanese reference works and the Asuka Village cultural property office likewise discuss the Baekje tile makers and the Goguryeo-like plan, while also highlighting the Soga clan’s role as patron, the mobilisation of local potters and the Kofun-style deposits in the pagoda. These accounts share much of the same evidence and should not be read as two opposing national interpretations.

The origin of the plan is also discussed. The three-hall layout does not match the one-pagoda, one-hall plan usual in excavated Baekje temples such as Jeongnimsa, and it closely resembles the Goguryeo site of Cheongam-ri. That resemblance supports a connection with Goguryeo architecture, but it does not identify who supplied the design or show that the Goguryeo monk Hyeja took part in planning it.

Finally, the framework used to interpret these exchanges also matters. The historian Satō Makoto argues that sixth-century relations between Wa (Japan) and the states of the Korean peninsula should be re-examined from a wider East Asian perspective, as multidirectional exchanges, without projecting modern nation-state frameworks onto the past. Asuka-dera is best understood in that light, as the product of Chinese Buddhist models, Korean kingdoms, immigrant families in Japan and a Japanese elite choosing what to adopt.