The shrine takes its name from Lady Tachibana -- Agata no Inukai no Michiyo -- the mother of Empress Komyo. According to the monk Kenshin, writing in the 1230s, Lady Tachibana commissioned the shrine as a nenjibutsu, a tutelary image for daily personal worship. It may have been bestowed upon Horyu-ji by Empress Komyo following her mother's death in 733. The earliest documentary evidence for the shrine's existence appears in a Horyu-ji temple inventory from 747, which lists 'two items taking the form of a palace building, one with a design of a Thousand Buddhas in repoussed metalwork, the other with a statue of gilt bronze.' The former is the famous Tamamushi Shrine; the latter is the Tachibana Shrine. For centuries, the two shrines stood side by side on the great altar of the Kondo, Horyu-ji's main worship hall, before being relocated in modern times to the Gallery of Temple Treasures.

The interior of the shrine is an exercise in devotional miniature. On the floor sits a bronze plaque depicting a lotus pond in relief, complete with ripples and floating leaves. Three holes puncture the plaque, and from each rises a lotus stalk supporting one of the gilt bronze figures. Behind the triad stands a tripartite hinged screen bearing five bodhisattvas and heavenly maidens in relief, with an openwork halo framing the central Amida figure. The whole arrangement transforms a small wooden box into a vision of the Western Pure Land -- Amida's paradise -- rendered in metal and lacquer. It is devotion compressed into portable form, a personal cosmos that Lady Tachibana could contemplate each morning.

The shrine's wooden exterior tells its own layered story. The canopy top features two rows of overlapping cloth hangings painted in blue, three shades of red, yellow, and black on a white ground. The original doors -- one survives in the Fujita Collection -- are painted on both sides with Nio and Shitenno guardians and bodhisattvas, rendered in gold paste on lacquer. The pedestal carries standing bodhisattvas with raised hands on the front, arhats on the narrow sides, and on the better-preserved back panel, three figures in different poses on lotuses, painted on a white gofun ground made from heated shells. Art historians Alexander Soper and Paine identified strong Indian as well as Tang Chinese influence in these paintings, remarking that 'the shrine reveals the many influences which were then current in Buddhism, as it reached Japan at the turn of the seventh century.' In one small object, the artistic currents of half the Asian continent converge.

What makes the Tachibana Shrine remarkable is not just its age or artistry but its sheer persistence. This fragile wooden cabinet and its bronze occupants have survived earthquakes, fires, wars, and the slow decay of centuries. When first built, the shrine may have been open on all four sides, the roof supported on columns alone, with the doors added later. That structural evolution -- from open pavilion to enclosed cabinet -- mirrors the shrine's journey from active devotional object to museum piece, from a mother's daily prayer station to a National Treasure behind glass. The gilt bronze Amida still gazes forward with the same half-lidded serenity that greeted Lady Tachibana each morning. The lotus pond beneath the figures has not rippled in thirteen hundred years, yet the scene remains as immediate as the day it was cast.