Nanzo-in Temple

This guide to Nanzo-in Temple in Fukuoka opens with an engineering puzzle: how to keep a giant bronze reclining Buddha from crushing itself under its own weight. You'll hear about the 1988 gift that set the project in motion, actual relics of the Buddha sent from Myanmar's Buddhist council in thanks for the temple's medical aid abroad, and how the builders solved the casting problem with sand carried from all eighty-eight temples of the Shikoku pilgrimage route. It follows the monks who still climb the statue each year to scrub it clean with bamboo leaves.