Yakushi-ji Temple stands in Nishinokyo, in the western part of Nara. Its Main Hall, the Kondo, was lost to fire in 1528, and for centuries afterward the temple made do with only a temporary hall in its place. It was not until the 1960s — nearly four hundred years later — that a movement began to restore the temple to its former form.

The temple's chief priest at the time, Koin Takada, resolved to fund the reconstruction through a nationwide sutra-copying campaign, asking a thousand yen for each copy and aiming for one million in all. Day after day, he is said to have traveled the country, meeting people, speaking to them, and bowing his head again and again — a pace of life that, to any onlooker, must have seemed relentless.

And yet, in every single copied sutra that arrived at the temple, there lived a quiet moment: someone, somewhere, pausing amid their own busy day to sit before a sheet of paper and carefully guide a brush across it. After an almost unimaginable number of such prayers had gathered — one million in all — the Main Hall once again caught the light, in 1976.