Shin-Yakushi-ji

Most people who make the walk up to Shin-Yakushi-ji have come for one room. The main hall is a low building with long white walls, and it is one of the few structures left from the temple Empress Komyo founded in 747 to pray for the recovery of her husband, Emperor Shomu. Inside there are no ceiling boards, so you look straight up into the roof frame, and 40 round pillars stand on a packed earth floor. In the middle is a circular clay platform about 9 m across and 90 cm high. On it sits a large seated Yakushi, the Buddha of healing, carved from torreya wood in the late Nara or early Heian period, eyes wide open, a medicine jar in his left hand. A survey in 1975 found eight scrolls of the Lotus Sutra inside the statue.

Around him, facing outward, stand the Twelve Heavenly Generals. They are clay figures from the 8th century, each between about 154 and 166 cm tall, and the temple calls them the oldest and largest set in Japan. Eleven are National Treasures; the twelfth was lost and replaced in wood in 1931. The eyes are blown glass in dark blue, green and brown, and patches of the original blue, red and green paint still cling to the armour. The one registered as Basara, mouth open mid-shout and hair standing on end, gets the longest stares. Walk the full circle anyway: each general also guards one of the twelve zodiac animals, and plenty of visitors go looking for their own birth year.

The rest of the grounds take ten minutes. The south gate, the bell tower and the small Jizo-do hall were added in the Kamakura period. The original Golden Hall, which stood about 150 m to the west on land now inside Nara University of Education, blew down in a storm in 962.

Entry is 600 yen, and the temple is open 9:00 to 17:00 every day. The approach is a city loop bus to Wariishi-cho and an uphill walk through residential lanes with few English signs. If you can, come on the evening of 8 April, when ten torches more than 7 m long are carried around the hall.