Is it just me, or are others sometimes surprised to read of how far people would travel in the days when travel was not easy? I just read a short piece about the Todaiji temple in Nara, which noted that although Japan had its isolation period, it wasn't so disconnected from the rest of Asia before that. In particular, the Great Buddha statue inside it was the subject of an consecration ceremony that had many guests. This is the brief description:
A rite to consecrate a newly created Buddhist image is called an eye-opening ceremony. In the year 752, thousands of important monks and court, civil and military officials from around the known world were invited to the commemoration ceremony.
It is said to have been a huge, cosmopolitan affair with representatives from Persia (Iran), Silla (Korea), the Tang Dynasty (China), Vietnam, Central and Southeast Asia and other places in attendance.
The Indian monk Bodhisena invited the spirit into the Buddha by painting the pupils on the eyes of the statue. International music and dances were performed, and it was one big bash!
The story of the influential Indian monk who did the ceremony is expanded upon in this article.
Actually, I see from another site that maybe it was a retired emperor who did (or shared?) the eye painting. History is so unreliable:
The Great Buddha and Tōdai-ji temple were consecrated in 752. The “eye-opening” ceremony was attended by visitors from the Asian continent. The 17,000 attendees included monks and nobles from Japan, as well as monks and dignitaries from China, Korea, and India. Of course, the reigning Empress Kōken was there. So was her father, the retired emperor Shōmu. Shōmu played an important role at the dedication. As the person most responsible for the building of the statue and temple, he held the paintbrush as the statue’s eyes were painted. This rite was seen as an invitation to the spirit of Buddha to enter the statue (Morimoto 2002).Anyhow, my point is: this was a big ceremony with quite a lot of people who had travelled from very far away. Pretty impressive.
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I remember a talk we went to about beekeeping in ancient times and one point of discussion was the vast distances people must have crossed with bees on board/in the cart. (Call to mind that these are creatures who get very confused if the hive is moved slightly; they return to the spot where their hive originally was - standard practice is to take the hive to a spot relatively distant, over 5 km away, so out of their visual memory range, overnight. And voyages in ancient times weren't particularly fast. How could you do it with a box of angry stingy creatures????)
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