S P O T ／ SPOT-078

Gifu Daibutsu (Shōhō-ji's Bamboo-and-Paper Buddha)

岐阜大仏（正法寺）ぎふだいぶつ（しょうほうじ）

Inside an unassuming temple hall in central Gifu, a 13.63-meter seated Shaka Buddha presides as one of the strangest engineering achievements in Japanese Buddhist art — and the largest dry-lacquer-and-paper Buddha in Japan. Construction began in 1791 by the temple's eleventh abbot as a memorial for victims of the great famines and earthquakes that had devastated Gifu in the late 18th century. The frame was built around the trunk of an enormous ginkgo tree; over the trunk, a basket-like cage was woven from bamboo; on the bamboo, clay was applied; over the clay, approximately 40,000 paper copies of Buddhist sutras handwritten on Mino washi were pasted, layer after layer; and the whole was finally finished in lacquer and gold leaf. The technique — called the kago, or 'basket,' construction — has no real parallel anywhere else, and the Buddha himself sits, lightweight and luminous, inside a temple barely wider than his shoulders. Designated a Cultural Property of Gifu Prefecture in 1974, the Gifu Daibutsu is sometimes counted as one of Japan's three great Buddhas, alongside Nara and Kamakura.