Emperor Shomu

Shomu's reign ran through smallpox, drought, famine and a serious rebellion. The epidemic of 735 to 737 is estimated to have killed a large share of the population and carried off all four Fujiwara brothers who dominated the court, and the state's response was framed as a religious one. In 741 the emperor decreed that every province should establish a monastery and a convent, the kokubunji and kokubunniji, each supported from provincial revenue, each housing a fixed number of ordained clergy, and each holding copies of protective scripture, above all the Golden Light Sutra, whose promise is that the four heavenly kings will guard a realm where it is recited.

The system did something no earlier patronage had. It made Buddhism an arm of provincial administration rather than a religion of the capital's aristocracy, put ordained clergy on the state payroll in every province, and tied the fortunes of the realm explicitly to the correct performance of Buddhist ritual. Scriptoria copying sutras on an industrial scale were part of the same apparatus, and the surviving manuscripts and their administrative paperwork are among the best documented evidence anywhere for how an early state ran a religious programme.

The head of the network was Todai-ji at the capital, Nara, and the emperor's own status inside it was carefully stated. In the edict calling for the great image he described himself as a servant of the Three Treasures, the Buddha, the teaching and the community, which places the sovereign beneath the religion rather than above it, an unusual formulation for a monarch whose own line claimed descent from the sun goddess. In 749 he abdicated and was ordained, the first Japanese sovereign to take Buddhist vows, and several of his successors followed.

The image Shomu ordered in 743 was of Vairocana, the cosmic Buddha of the Flower Garland Sutra, in whose teaching every being and every world is contained in the body of the Buddha, an idea that suited a ruler trying to hold a realm together. The statue stands roughly fifteen metres seated and consumed most of the bronze available in the country, along with gold from a newly opened deposit in the north whose discovery was announced as a sign of favour. Casting took years and several failures. The hall built to house it is one of the largest wooden buildings in the world, and the present hall, twice rebuilt and smaller than the original, still holds the image.

The dedication in 752 was deliberately international. The eye-opening, the rite that brings an image to life, was performed by Bodhisena, a Brahmin monk from southern India who had travelled to Japan by way of China, with music and dance from Tang China, Korea and central Asia, before an assembly of thousands of monks. The brush he used and hundreds of objects from the ceremony survive, because Shomu's consort Komyo gave his personal treasures to the temple after his death, and the Shosoin repository has kept them since, an unbroken collection of eighth century material with no parallel anywhere.

Before beginning, Shomu sent envoys to the shrine of Amaterasu at Ise and to Hachiman at Usa to ask the kami whether the project should proceed, and the Hachiman oracle answered that the deity would lead the gods to assist it. The image of Hachiman was then brought ceremonially to Nara. That episode is repeatedly cited as a founding moment in the long combination of kami and buddhas in Japan, in which local deities were understood as protectors of the Buddhist teaching and later as manifestations of buddhas.