Emperor Shōmu poured the national treasury into a 500-ton bronze Buddha

In 737 a smallpox epidemic killed a third of the Nara aristocracy, including four brothers of the powerful Fujiwara clan. Famine followed. Emperor Shōmu, desperate for a unifying symbol, issued an edict in 743 calling for the construction of a colossal bronze Vairocana Buddha at Tōdaiji in Nara. It was to be the largest bronze casting ever attempted: roughly 15 metres tall and, with its hall, the largest wooden building in the world.

The project consumed copper, gold, mercury and labour from every province. The first casting in 747 failed. A second attempt in 749 failed. The gold for the Buddha's surface did not exist in Japan — it was found only when a gold mine was discovered at Mutsu in the north that same year, and the court treated the discovery as divine approval. A third and final casting succeeded in 752. The eye-opening ceremony drew thousands of monks and dignitaries from across the Buddhist world; Indian and Chinese priests presided.

The financial cost is undocumented in a single figure, but contemporaries recorded its weight. The temple's own records state the image used roughly 500 tons of copper and 1,400 pounds of gold. The ritsuryō state — a Tang-modelled fiscal system that taxed provinces in rice, cloth and corvée labour — was already strained by famine and epidemic. The Great Buddha consumed surplus and borrowing capacity that would have covered relief, defence, and administration for decades.

Within a generation of the casting, the ritsuryō system began to break down. Provincial governors commuted taxes into private income, tax evasion spread, and private estates (shōen) multiplied because the state could no longer enforce collection. The capital moved to Kyoto in 794 — partly to escape the political dominance of the Nara temples that the Great Buddha had crowned. The Buddha still stands. The state that built it could not afford to govern for much longer.