Amazarasti-No Hotoke

Japanese Tea Garden
Golden Gate Park

At the eastern end of Long Bridge, inside the Japanese Tea Garden sits this magnificent statue. It is  “Amazarasti-no Hotoke” meaning “The Buddha that sits throughout the sunny and rainy weather without shelter”.

The figure was cast in 1790 at Tajima, Nara Prefecture, on Honshu for the Taioriji Temple.  It passed from one Japanese collector to the next until is was purchased by A. L. Gump in 1928.  It sat in the downstairs Oriental Court of the Post Street Gump’s store until remodeling banished it to storage.  When a wooden Buddha in the Garden was destroyed by vandals, the Gump family donated the giant figure in memory of their father.

In 2000 the Buddha was taken to the conservation lab of Baird/Rief in Grass Valley where old repairs and corrosion were carefully removed and filled with new materials before restoring the patina. Meanwhile, back at the park, the old rotted wooden pedestal was replaced with a hand-cut black granite base that will seat the Buddha for a century or two more. To insure that the Buddha doesn’t shift or slump, a new armature rises from the base and supports the weight of the satori that rings the Buddha’s head. The carpenters at the Recreation and Park Department completed the project by enclosing the Buddha with an elegant fence. This $173,000 project was partially funded by the Adopt-a-Monument program with the help of Gump’s Department Store and the Recreation and Parks Department. Contractors on the project besides Baird/Rief were Robert Bailey, Structural Engineer, Atthowe Fine Arts Services, Rocket Science and Edwin Hamilton.