Kyoto Tour - Sanjusangen-do

 

Now, I only have one photo of this place. There are a couple of reasons for this. Firstly, my camera was acting up, despite being fully charged, and secondly these statues are sacred. What the latter means is that there are monks on patrol and if they catch you they will delete your pictures and treat you to an ear-blistering buddhist lecture.
So I couldn't take any pictures myself but I can show you a few official snaps of the statues.

You can see above the most unfortunate weather as the typhoon rolled in. :C
Right at the base of the building you can also observe the 'tree' of abandoned fortunes.

Sanjusangen-do is a buddhist temple devoted to Kannon, the goddess of mercy - in particular the incarnation of the thousand-armed kannon. The hindu influence is very strong here

According to the guide. 1000 is a number of perfection and there's lots of careful calculation to have it appear throughout. Although several statutes were on loan to museums.

Unfortunately I can't find any photos of the diagram but I found this particularly interesting. None of the statues are bolted down. They're standing under their own power but the hall is so built that earthquakes have never bothered of knocked any of the shrine. The support pillars go right down into the foundation and are earthed on a pit of pebbles and gravel designed to absorb the shocks. It works, the statues are never bothered. Yay- science.

So, official statues 'borrowed' from erm...look at the pretty pictures!!!

What these photos utterly fail to express is the intimidating scale of this hall and the eerieness involved.

The statute are made of wood and painted with gold dust and they are built by many different artisans - which makes how similar they all look that much more terrifying.

When you turn the corner and see them all, it's definitely a 'wow' moment. Very impressive and the central image is, as always, gigantic.

It's still in service and there were devotees praying while we were there and monks everywhere snooping about waving incense, beeds and other......monk things.