There are windows, very domestic- and modern-seeming windows with casement shutters, in the back (literally, in the figure’s back!) of the Great Buddha of Kamakura at Kōtoku-in. I had known that the Buddha (cast in 1252) was hollow, and that disrespectful early foreign visitors had profaned the interior of the statue with their graffiti, but I hadn’t known about the windows.

Now I can’t help as an architect but fill my head with notions of residential architecture in the form of giant religious figures. Has anyone ever done that? Would anyone ever want to do that? What would the Buddha Amitābha think about it?