Horinji's greatest treasures are not its buildings but its sculptures. The principal image is a seated Yakushi Nyorai, the Buddha of healing, dating to the end of the Asuka period. Beside it stands a figure carved from a single block of camphor wood, rising 175 centimeters tall. One arm reaches forward, palm up; the other hangs at its side, holding a water pitcher. Most of the original paint has worn away over thirteen centuries, revealing the golden grain of bare wood beneath. The statue is called Kokuzo Bosatsu, but that name likely came later, attached by devotees who believed Prince Shotoku was an incarnation of that deity. Its true identity remains uncertain -- it may have originally represented Kannon Bosatsu, paralleling the famous Kudara Kannon at Horyuji, which carried the same mistaken name until the Meiji period. The Lecture Hall houses a towering 3.5-meter Amida figure from the Heian period, and the temple's collection spans multiple Important Cultural Properties from the Asuka and Heian eras.

For centuries, the three-story pagoda defined Horinji's skyline. When the capital moved from Nara to Kyoto and patronage dried up, the temple declined. A typhoon in 1645 leveled most of the compound. But the pagoda survived -- standing alone through the Edo period as the sole remnant of the original complex, watching over empty foundations. Then, on a summer night in 1944, lightning struck. The pagoda burned to the ground in two hours. For three decades, the site where it had stood was bare earth. The reconstruction campaign that followed became something of a national cause. The novelist Koda Aya, daughter of the celebrated writer Koda Rohan, championed the effort, and donations flowed in from parishioners, schoolchildren, and supporters across Japan. The new pagoda was completed in 1975, faithful to the original Asuka-period design but built with modern lightning protection. Because it is a reconstruction, it is excluded from the UNESCO World Heritage designation that covers the Buddhist Monuments in the Horyuji Area -- a technicality that does nothing to diminish its beauty.

Horinji's original name was Miidera, meaning "Temple of Three Wells," and the story behind it reaches back to Prince Shotoku himself. He is said to have excavated a well here, and documents from the Muromachi and Edo periods record three wells on the grounds, though only one survives. Filled in during the Meiji period, the remaining well was forgotten until archaeologists rediscovered it in 1932. What they found was extraordinary: a shaft 4.2 meters deep, nearly a meter across, with a structure unlike anything else in Japan. The lower portion uses stonework, but the upper three meters are built entirely of fan-shaped bricks -- 25 centimeters long, wider on the outer face than the inner, 7.6 centimeters thick. No other site in Japan uses this particular style of brickwork in such quantity. The well was designated a National Historic Site in 1944, the same year lightning took the pagoda.

Between Horinji and neighboring Hokki-ji, on the western slope of a low hill called Kawarazuka, lie the remains of a tile kiln that once fed both temples. Discovered in 1931 during orchard reclamation, the site turned out to be the legendary "Tile Mound" referenced in ancient records. The kiln was an underground climbing-kiln, a noborigama, with its mouth facing southwest and a firing floor angled at roughly 40 degrees across more than 10 steps. The horizontal distance from fire opening to the top of the surviving chamber stretches about 4.9 meters. Fragments of flat and round roof tiles were excavated, some with charcoal and burnt soil still mixed in. Archaeologists estimate the kiln supplied tiles to both Horyuji and Horinji between the late seventh and early eighth centuries. Designated a National Historic Site in 1932, these ruins represent the industrial backbone behind Ikaruga's famous wooden architecture -- the hidden labor of fire and clay that kept the rain off sacred halls.