The Roben-sugi of Nigatsu-do

An eagle carried off a baby and left it in a cedar on this slope, and the baby grew up to found Todai-ji. That is the legend of the Roben-sugi. The infant was Roben, later the temple's first abbot, found and raised by a monk, and the tree on the spot has carried his name ever since. A stone monument beside it records the story. This is not that cedar, and nobody here pretends it is. The original lived roughly six hundred years and reached 21.2 metres before the Second Muroto Typhoon came through Nara on 16 September 1961 with winds recorded at 75 metres a second. What happened afterwards is where the accounts part. One says the replacement failed to take and the tree standing today went in on 16 March 1967, raised from the one that died. Another calls this the fourth generation rather than the third. They disagree about how many attempts it took, not about whether this one has held. So it is roughly sixty years old, which makes it the youngest tree on this page. Nara is a good place to be relaxed about that. The address is the relic here, not the timber. It stands below the slope Nigatsu-do occupies, immediately north of the small Kojo Shrine, and the pin follows that description rather than a surveyed trunk. Free, part of Todai-ji's outer precinct, and the climb up is short.