"The Great Buddha of Nagoya"- Togan-ji temple, Motoyama.

A climbing gorilla statue on a building at Motoyama

We reached the Motoyama station from Fushimi via subway Hiashiyama line. As we got out of the station we were a bit confused about the path we have to walk through to reach the Togan-ji temple. At last we asked a man who passed by about the temple and he helped us. Thus we walked to our left from the 5th exit of the station. We found a gate which resembles that of a temple. Anyway, we entered inside and looked around for the giant statue of Budha, which we couldn`t find there. There were few men found inside and thought that we have reached some wrong direction .

The temple.

 We just walk around the shrine and saw the green colored statue of Budha down.  We walked down through the pavement between the  thick trees. But the colour of the statue was actually out of our expectations, don`t know why it is painted in green.  There was a graveyard on the right side of the small statue gate through which we entered.

Graveyard near the temple

Then we noticed that there is a road through the back side of the statue known as the Yotsuya-dori. The 10m tall Budha statue with its closed eyes and hands with dharma-chakra- pravarthana ("turning the wheel of Dharma ") mudra has a picture of wheel(chakra) in its palm which resembles the Asoka chakra.

The giant Budha statue of Motayama.

 Togan-ji is not an ordinary Budhist temple. It has not only the Big Budha but also a rgave of the father of a famous samurai commander Nobunaga Oda, a sleeping statue of Lordess Saraswathi,  a faith of siva linga and lama religious and so on. At the bottom of the statue there are small statues of worshippers around a lotus, elephants, deers etc.

The hand with chakra in its palm near the Budha statue.

After spending a 15 minutes over there, we left the place. By that time there came another group to click their snaps from there .