WHEN a paroxysm of civil war smashed the old order in the later twelfth century,
Buddhist architecture shared in the new freedom that followed. The Heian style, created
by a conservative aristocracy to serve a timeless religion, had pursued its own narrow
path of development with imperturbable slowness. The swiftly rising cross-currents of
the Kamakura age brought instead an almost anarchic variety. At least four sharply con-
trasted phenomena characterized Buddhist building between the late twelfth and late
fourteenth centuries, and three of these represented a radical break with Heian custom.
One was in intention archaistic, a turning back to the memory of Nara. Two were
exotic; Chinese styles introduced by special backers. Only the fourth marked a further
stage of progress in the direction already explored; and even that was now enriched, or
confused, by novelties far outside the experience of the past.

The first phenomenon was the least important in area affected and duration of influence.
The early military regime at Kamakura was not too revolutionary to recognize the value
of tradition. Gradually stripping the Kyōto court of authority and wealth, the Sh¯gunate
found it useful to patronize another society that symbolized as purely, but less danger-
ously, the values of the past: that of Nara. A policy of reviving the religious life of the old
capital was initiated by the conqueror, Minamoto no Yoritomo, in part from a sense of
feudal responsibility; the two greatest Nara houses, Tōdaiji and K¯fukuji, had been
Minamoto partisans during the civil war, and had taken catastrophic punishment after a
Taira success. The rebuilding of T¯daiji in particular was punctiliously carried out as a
first claim on the overlord's gratitude. For several generations largesse was scattered
among other temples of the Nara vicinity, reviving their ancient ceremonies and repairing
or replacing icons and buildings. A large percentage of the halls and gates still visible there,
that can claim a respectable antiquity, date from this period. Properly enough, their
interest to-day is chiefly antiquarian. Because it was natural to erect them on the original
sites, still marked by platforms and pillar bases, the Kamakura period restorations have
kept alive something of the formal dignity of the Tempyō style. The buildings in plan and
details may still subscribe to the eighth-century formulas. Excellent examples of such
archaism are the kondō and lecture hall of Taimadera. Hōryūji has four noteworthy
Kamakura halls outside its ancient nucleus. At Yakushiji the most ancient surviving hall
is the Tōindō of 1285, east of the pagoda.

As might be expected, none of this work is of the first interest. The consistently con-
servative buildings by the very faithfulness of their imitation underline the disappearance
of the subtleties of proportion and outline that had animated the Nara originals. The
less conservative may suffer from stylistic inconsistency; in the Tōindō a Tempy¯-like

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