Giant Buddha Statues: Leshan, Bamiyan and the Tallest

By Tim Yu, Founder & Editor · Published 2 November 2026

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A giant Buddha is a statue far larger than life, made out of devotion or to honour a ruler. The tallest standing today, according to the art historian Dorothy Wong and Henan’s government, is China’s Spring Temple Buddha, a Vairocana 108 metres tall and 208 in total. The largest before modern times, in Wong’s view, is the 71-metre Leshan Maitreya; the Bamiyan Buddhas were destroyed in 2001. Bangkok’s Golden Buddha is, for Guinness, the largest solid gold sculpture, and Hong Kong’s “Big Buddha” is the Tian Tan Buddha.

Not every giant Buddha is the historical Buddha: Wong finds that the colossi “predominantly feature Śākyamuni (the Historical Buddha), Maitreya (the Future Buddha), and Vairocana” (p. 1). Heights vary with what is counted, statue, lotus seat, pedestal or platform, so each is given here as its source gives it.

The giant Buddhas at a glance

Which giant Buddha is the biggest?

It depends what you measure, and who is measuring:

• Tallest standing: the Spring Temple Buddha. Wong wrote in 2019 that “Currently, the largest standing Buddha statue is the Vairocana image” at Yaoshan (p. 20); Henan’s government called it “the tallest of its kind in the world” in 2020. We found no Guinness record for a tallest Buddha statue, and colossi are still being built, so this is a dated claim.
• Bronze: Guinness World Records lists the Ushiku Daibutsu under “Tallest bronze sculpture”: 110 metres for the Buddha and its lotus base. Chen Ching-hsiang, writing in 2013, calls the Spring Temple Buddha the world’s largest cast-bronze standing Buddha. The two claims conflict, so we give both.
• Before modern times: the Leshan Maitreya, “the largest of all colossi in pre-modern times” in Wong’s words (p. 15). UNESCO’s superlatives for it are set out in the greatest Buddhist monuments.
• Seated: the Leshan Maitreya, carved from the cliff, is 71 metres high (UNESCO). Two newer claims conflict: Wong (2019, p. 20) calls the 48-metre seated Buddha at Liudingshan, Jilin (2011) “the world’s tallest seated Buddha statue”, “20 meters taller than the Hong Kong example”, while Po Lin Monastery’s site (read November 2026) calls its Big Buddha “the biggest sitting Buddha statue built outdoor”.
• Solid gold: the Golden Buddha of Wat Traimit, by Guinness’s record.

Myanmar’s Laykyun Sekkya at Monywa often appears in such lists; we have not found a reliable source for its height, so it is not in our table (for the country’s Buddhism, see Buddhism in Myanmar).

Why Buddhists built colossal Buddhas

Devotion. Colossi, Wong writes, “were fashioned out of religious devotion and frequently in conjunction with notions of Buddhist kingship” (p. 1), and she notes the “religious economy associated with travels and pilgrimages to view and worship” them (p. 18).

What counts as giant. According to descriptions in Buddhist texts, Wong writes, the Buddha stood 16 chi, about 4.8 metres, which became the standard “full-size” image in East Asia (jōroku in Japanese). Anything taller, she reports, scholars call a “Great Buddha” (p. 3): Chinese dafo, Japanese daibutsu.

A cosmic Buddha. As Buddhist thought exalted the Buddha as supramundane, colossal size “became a metaphor for the cosmic, universal dimension of the Buddha or Buddhahood” (Wong, p. 3). Several East Asian giants depict Vairocana, the cosmic Buddha of the Avatamsaka Sutra.

The future Buddha. Maitreya sutras, such as the one Wong cites from the Chinese canon (T 456), make Maitreya, the Buddha to come, 320 chi tall; Akira Miyaji argues, as Wong reports, that such descriptions inspired colossal Maitreyas (p. 5).

Kings and emperors. Once spiritual and temporal kingship merged, Wong argues, a statue’s scale came “to symbolize the authority and stature of rulers” (p. 3). Todai-ji’s history says Emperor Shomu ordered a monumental Vairocana in 743, hoping that “the benefits of peace may be brought to all in heaven and on earth”.

Giving. The early projects were started by monks, Wong notes, raising funds themselves or securing the support of rulers and local officials (p. 18); the sums needed often relied on official support (p. 24). At Bamiyan, Xuanzang records that the king often held a five-yearly assembly at which he gave everything from his queen down to the national treasures to the monks, then gave himself, and his officials ransomed him: an act of dana, or generosity, which Wong reads with the statues as evidence of Buddhist kingship (p. 8).

The Leshan Giant Buddha

The Leshan Giant Buddha is a seated Maitreya carved from a sandstone cliff where the Min, Qingyi and Dadu rivers meet in Sichuan. Wong (p. 15) records that the monk Haitong began it in 713 and that it was finished in 803, after two further phases funded by the officials Zhangchou Jianqiong and Wei Gao. Wei’s dedicatory inscription records Haitong’s hope that the Buddha would “calm the turbulent waters” that plagued boats on the river.

UNESCO gives 71 metres; ICOMOS’s 1996 evaluation gives 71 metres overall, with the body 59.96 metres. Three drainage tunnels cut in ancient times run through the head, neck and chest, a 2021 conservation study reports, but seepage through the chest and abdomen is still damaging the stone. The statue is inscribed with Mount Emei as a World Heritage site, covered in the greatest Buddhist monuments; for its setting, see Buddhism in China.

The Bamiyan Buddhas

Two standing Buddhas, 55 and 38 metres high by UNESCO’s figures, stood in niches cut into the cliffs of the Bamiyan Valley in Afghanistan. The Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang passed through in the early 7th century:

“Feet” renders the Chinese chi (尺). He also describes a cast standing Buddha over 100 chi tall; our sources do not say which description matches which niche.

Who they were. Wong judges that the two “most likely represent a transcendent form of Śākyamuni” (p. 7), linking their scale to the Lokottaravāda school, which Xuanzang found among Bamiyan’s monks.

How old. Still debated. Mass-spectrometer dating of organic matter in the statues’ clay, by a Technical University of Munich team led by Erwin Emmerling, gave the smaller Buddha AD 544–595 and the larger AD 591–644, Archaeology magazine reported in 2011. Most scholars, it says, had dated them one to two centuries earlier from the style of the robes; Wong (p. 7), citing earlier studies, puts the larger in the 7th century and the smaller probably in the 8th.

What happened. The Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar ordered all statues in Afghanistan broken, citing a fatwa of Afghan scholars and a verdict of the country’s Supreme Court: the “idols”, he said, “have been gods of the infidels” and might become gods again (quoted in Archaeology, 2 March 2001). On 2 March 2001 the Taliban began firing artillery at the statues; explosives brought them down by the end of the month (Archaeology, 2011). In 2011 Brendan Cassar of UNESCO’s Kabul office said plans to rebuild them had been rejected as too costly and difficult; he did not rule out a reconstruction someday, but said the work then was to plug cracks in the unstable niches, clear mines and unexploded bombs, and conserve what could be saved of the rubble. Field work halted after August 2021; UNESCO reported in 2024 that some projects had resumed since February 2023, in particular those funded by Italy and Japan, and it lists the “risk of collapse of the Giant Buddha niches” among the threats to the site. For the valley as a World Heritage site, see the greatest Buddhist monuments.

The Great Buddhas of Japan

Todai-ji, Nara. The Great Buddha is “properly known as Vairocana Buddha”, the temple says, and it explains Vairocana through Śākyamuni’s enlightenment as the Avatamsaka Sutra describes it; Wong calls Vairocana “the transcendent form of Śākyamuni” (p. 4). Cast in eight stages, it was finished in 749 and consecrated in 752. Much of what stands is restored. Its head fell in an earthquake in 855; after fires set in 1180 the monk Chōgen repaired the head and left hand and rededicated it in 1185; after the hall burned in 1567 the statue “was washed by rains for almost one hundred years”, until the head was recast from 1686 and the statue rededicated in 1692. The present hall, about sixty percent of the original width, was dedicated in 1709. The temple measures it at 14.98 metres on a 3.05-metre pedestal. Todai-ji and its hall are covered in the greatest Buddhist monuments; see Buddhism in Japan for its place in Nara Buddhism.

Kotoku-in, Kamakura. The Kamakura Daibutsu is “a colossal copper image” of Amida, the temple says: Amitabha, the Buddha of the Pure Land. Construction began in 1252, according to the chronicle Azumakagami; its maker is unknown. Its hall was destroyed in 1334, 1369 and 1498, so it sits in the open air, which, the temple notes, makes it unusual among large Buddha statues in Japan. The temple gives 11.312 metres for the statue, 13.35 metres with the platform.

Ushiku Daibutsu, Ibaraki. Also an Amida. Its official site, that of the head temple of the Jodo Shinshu Higashi Honganji-ha, a Pure Land denomination, gives 120 metres, a height chosen for Amida’s twelve lights, and says sutras are chanted inside every morning and evening. Guinness measures the Buddha and lotus base only: 110 metres, completed in 1992.

The Big Buddha of Hong Kong

The Tian Tan Buddha at Po Lin Monastery, Lantau Island, is the statue the monastery itself calls “the Big Buddha”. Po Lin named it for the Tian Tan, Beijing’s Altar of Heaven, which inspired its base. It depicts Shakyamuni, seated, right hand in the gesture of fearlessness, left in the gesture of granting wishes (see mudras). The monastery says its monks resolved to build it after seeing the Kamakura Great Buddha in 1973, and that it “symbolizes the stability of Hong Kong, prosperity of China and peace on earth”. Cast in 202 bronze pieces, it had its last piece put in place on 13 October 1989 and was inaugurated on 29 December 1993. Wong gives its height as 26.4 metres, without saying what the figure includes; Po Lin’s own page gives no overall height, and we have found no official source for the larger figures quoted elsewhere.

The modern colossi of China

China’s modern wave of colossi began with the Hong Kong Buddha, Wong writes (p. 20). Others followed, among them the standing bronze Amitabha at Lingshan, Wuxi (1996), 88 metres in Wong’s table (p. 19). The tallest is the Spring Temple Buddha, the “Great Buddha of the Central Plain”, a standing Vairocana completed in 2008 at Yaoshan, Henan: 108 metres for the statue and 208 in all (Wong). Chen Ching-hsiang, reporting on a 2013 visit in the Buddhist magazine Torch of Wisdom, places it in the scenic area of the Foquan Temple (佛泉寺) and gives its total height as 208 metres, with a 20-metre lotus seat, a 25-metre vajra seat and a 55-metre sumeru pedestal (p. 36). Not every modern giant is a Buddha: Wong’s 108-metre figure at Sanya, Hainan, is the bodhisattva Guanyin.

Why build them now? Not for Buddhist kingship, Wong finds; the money comes from governments and companies, and while “the religious intents in making these colossal statues are not in doubt”, heritage and tourism are more prominent (p. 23). The tourism consultant Zhou Mingqi argued in Sixth Tone (2018) that, for the local governments that approve them, these statues “may be aimed at the country’s religious believers”, but their “real purpose is far more worldly: making money”. Henan’s government says the Spring Temple Buddha draws believers to worship.

The Golden Buddha of Wat Traimit

The Golden Buddha in Bangkok is giant by weight, not height. Guinness World Records lists the Golden Buddha of Wat Traimit as the world’s largest solid gold sculpture: 3 metres tall and 5.5 tonnes of gold. Its origin is unknown, Guinness says, though its style suggests the Sukhothai era. At some point it was covered in plaster, “most likely” to hide it from invading Burmese. On 25 May 1955 it was dropped while being moved, the plaster chipped, and the gold showed through. See also Buddhism in Thailand.

Reclining Buddhas

A reclining Buddha shows the Buddha’s final passing. In the Mahāparinibbāna Sutta he asks Ānanda to set up a bed between twin sal trees:

The posture is explained in what a Buddha statue means, the story of his last days in the death of the Buddha, and the day that remembers it in Parinirvana Day.

Wat Pho, Bangkok. The temple’s Phra Buddha Saiyas is brick and stucco, lacquered and gilded, 46 metres long and 15 metres high from the base to the topknot, in what it calls the “Lion Sleep” position. Its Thai page says King Rama III had it made in the restoration of C.S. 1193 / B.E. 2375, and calls it the largest reclining Buddha in Bangkok and third largest in Thailand.

Gal Vihara, Polonnaruwa. ICOMOS (1982) dates the Gal Vihara, “with its gigantic rock sculptures”, to the reign of Parakramabahu I (1153–1186). The Cleveland Museum of Art describes a 12th-century monastic site with “a colossal stone sculpture of the reclining Buddha”, in ruins when Joseph Lawton photographed it in 1870–71. See Buddhism in Sri Lanka.

For how these statues fit the wider story, see the history of Buddhism.