S P O T ／ SPOT-245

Nanzoin Temple (Reclining Buddha)

南蔵院（釈迦涅槃像）なんぞういん（しゃかねはんぞう）

In the wooded hills of Sasaguri, just east of Fukuoka, a bronze Buddha 41 meters long lies on its side — one of the largest reclining Buddhas of its kind in the world, roughly the length of a jumbo jet and weighing some 300 tons. Reclining Buddhas of this scale belong to Thailand and Myanmar, not Japan, and that is precisely the point: Nanzoin's giant exists because of a connection to Myanmar. For years the temple shipped medicine and school supplies to children in Myanmar and Nepal, and in 1988 Myanmar's Buddhist conference repaid the kindness with a gift of sacred relics. The statue, completed in 1995 after three years of work, was built to house them. Nanzoin is also the head temple of the Sasaguri 88-temple pilgrimage, a serious place of faith threaded with Buddhist statuary, a Seven Lucky Gods tunnel, and sand-treading rites. And yet it is best known to many for a single irresistible rumor: its head priest is said to have won the lottery again and again, once to the tune of 130 million yen, making this colossal reclining Buddha an unlikely magnet for visitors praying for a windfall. We present the relic history as documented fact and the fortune legend as exactly that — legend.