your bridge home
Saints and Poets
Japan built the largest bronze Buddha in the world, and then sent for a brahmin from Madurai to paint in its eyes.
In 752, in front of seventeen thousand people, the largest bronze statue in the world was given its eyes.
And the man holding the brush had been born in Madurai.
Bodhisena was born in 704 in the Tamil country, a brahmin of the Bharadvaja line, and he became a Buddhist monk.
He travelled. First through India, then to China.
There he went looking for Manjushri on Mount Wutai. And there the Buddhist world of the age converged.
And at Wutai he met a Japanese embassy.
The rest of this story, read aloud, and a new one every day.