Yamada-dera

Yamada-dera (山田寺^?) was a Buddhist temple established in the Asuka period in Sakurai, Nara Prefecture, Japan. The area has been designated a Special Historic Site and forms part of a grouping of sites submitted in 2007 for future inscription on the UNESCO World Heritage List: Asuka-Fujiwara: Archaeological sites of Japan’s Ancient Capitals and Related Properties. Excavations in the 1980s uncovered a well-preserved section of the temple's covered corridors that predate the surviving buildings of Hōryū-ji: "for the history of Japanese architecture, this discovery is of as great moment as the finding of the seventh-century Takamatsuzuka tomb paintings in March 1972 was for the history of Japanese art."

Yamada-dera was established in 641 by Soga no Kurayamada no Ishikawa no Maro. After drainage of the site, work began on the kondō and surrounding corridors. The Nihon Shoki chronicles the suicide of the Soga founder at the kondō in 649, after false charges of treason had been brought against him. The Jōgū Shōtoku Hōō Teisetsu, a biography of Shōtoku Taishi, documents renewed construction at the site from 663 with the erection of a pagoda, after Prince Naka-no-Ōe, who had married one of the founder's daughters, had ascended the throne as Emperor Tenchi; this building was complete by 676. The uragaki or notes to Jōgū Shōtoku Hōō Teisetsu mention the eye-opening ceremony of a sixteen-foot Buddha in the temple's Lecture Hall in 685. The Nihon Shoki records a visit by Emperor Temmu a few months later to the temple of Jōdo-ji, identified by Aston as Asuka-dera but now thought to refer to Yamada-dera. In the following decade, Emperor Mommu granted lands to support the temple.Fujiwara no Michinaga visited in 1023 and was impressed by its splendour, according to the Fusō ryakuki (^?). By the end of the following century the kondō and pagoda had burned and, according to the Tōnomine ryakki (多武峰略記^?), the temple had become a branch of Tōnomine-dera (today's Tanzan Jinja).

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