Sanjusangendo and Kiyomizudera

Today, a handful of us went with Don to Sanjusangendo temple. It might give that other temple a run for largest wooden building. It's not very tall but it is 33 bays long. The main deity of the temple is Sahasrabhuja-arya-avalokitesvara, which is the thousand armed Kannon. There are 1,001 of the statues inside. In front of the statues, there are guardian statues, which each represent a different guardian. The space was really long, and they have held archery tournaments there for hundreds of years. Some of the beams that were replaced were kept to show how stray arrows had split the wood until it looked like thatch. One archer once fired over 13,000 times during a competition in which archers would fire for 24 hours straight. Over 8,000 of the arrows struck the target. Imagine drawing and firing a longbow for 24 hours straight.

After that, we went to Kiyomizudera. It was packed with people. There was a special opening of the main image hall and that was cool.Zach and I spotted some sweet drawings in the window of this tiny place and figured it was an architecture office since the name on the door was WORKAHOLIC. The guy was really nice and did all his drawings by hand. We talked for a bit then after exhausting pretty much all of our Japanese we left.