Pagoda with Darani sutra, from a set of One Million Pagodas

According to Japan’s earliest recorded histories, in the mid-760s, the Empress Shōtoku (718–770) commissioned the production of one million miniature scrolls printed with Buddhist incantations, each one enshrined within a small wooden pagoda. When they were completed, the empress donated one hundred thousand scroll-pagoda sculptures to each of the ten major Buddhist temples in Nara, then the capital. One of those temples, Hōryūji, still owns several thousand of Empress Shōtoku’s miniature pagodas. Tradition holds that the empress’s commission may have been related to a scandal involving a love affair with a young Buddhist priest and an attempted coup, but whatever the case, the empress no doubt garnered a vast amount of karma through her million-pagoda project.