The Great Hase Kannon at Kamakura (very similar to the one in Nara) (Wikipedia)
Do you remember visiting the Great Kannon at Kamakura's Hase-dera in Episode 048? Well, let's visit the scene of the rest of the story, in the original Hase-dera Temple, the one down south, in this episode of
TEMPLE TALES!
Some "History"
Recapping what we said in Episode 048, there was once a monk named Tokudo Shonin, who (as we learned even further back, in Episode 044) founded the Saigoku Pilgrimage after falling ill and visiting hell. Emma-O, King of Hell, asked him to provide the people a means of attaining holiness, as the infernal realms were getting overcrowded!
Yet another great gateway
But Tokudo (Shonin just means "holy man" or "saint") was also abbot of Hase-dera in Nara, and it happened like this: In 721 he had obtained an enormous camphor tree and ordered two statues of the Eleven-Headed Kannon to be carved from it. One was cast into the sea; that is the Kannon at Kamakura. But the other he kept for his own temple, the one we'll visit today.
Lafcadio Hearn told the story far better than I can in Chapter Four of his Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan: First Series. I encourage you to read it there (or read the long-ish excerpt in my Episode 048), but essentially, Tokudo had seen "a wonderful radiance," an unexpected light (as so often happened in the region; but imagine the effect on someone from a culture without electricity!) and, following this, discovered a fallen tree with a heavenly scent. Praying, he inadvertently invoked a magical old couple, who offered to carve the tree. They carved "two marvellous statues of Kannon made perfect before him," identified themselves as Shinto gods, and--transfigured--"ascended to heaven and vanished from the sight of Tokudo Shonin."