Hall of the Great Buddha

This second composition on the same subject — the 1180 burning of the Daibutsuden at Todai-ji by Taira no Shigehira — gives Takeda occasion to revisit a scene from a different vantage. Working in mokuhanga, he treats the Saru series as a sequence of variations rather than a fixed iconographic program, and paired views of a single event align with the way handscroll painters had long composed sequential scenes around one episode. The destruction of the Buddhist site is among the more morally weighted passages in the Heike chronicle, and Takeda's monkey cast preserves the gravity of the source even as it caricatures it. Compositional devices typical of the series recur here: flat color, strong contour, asymmetric grouping of figures, and the architectural framework of a temple complex used as a stage. The print belongs to the body of work most widely associated with Takeda outside Japan, exhibited at venues including the Tokyo National Museum.