Todai-ji Hokkedo (Sangatsudo, March Hall)

This guide to Todai-ji's Hokkedo, also called Sangatsudo, in Nara centers on the Fukukenjaku Kannon, an eighth-century bodhisattva with three eyes and eight arms that looks like solid gilded wood but is almost entirely hollow, built like a potter's jar over a clay core later broken out and discarded. It traces the hall itself, the oldest surviving structure at Todai-ji, through a warlord's fire in eleven eighty that destroyed the Great Buddha Hall nearby, and asks what let this one keep standing when so much else around it burned. Listen for how that same hollowness mattered again generations later, when Nara faced war a second time.