Toshodai-ji

This guide to Toshodai-ji in Nara follows the blind monk Ganjin, who survived five failed sea crossings to bring proper ordination rules to Japan, and the government office the imperial court handed him in 759 as payment he could not even see. It traces how that building, once a clerks' office inside the Nara Imperial Palace, was dismantled and hauled across the city to become this lecture hall, and asks what it meant to pay a man in property rather than coin. Look up at the beams above you: their proportions still read as office, not temple.