Temples

修学院 Gods of the Guiding Stars

On Saturday my friend and I elected to take the day off from worrying about the upcoming end-of-term exams (next week), and went on the hunt for temples. I had recently bought “Exploring Kyoto: on Foot in the Ancient Capital” by Judith Clancy, which has 30 different walks all around Kyoto. These walks cover loads of temples and contain a lot of information about the temples and even recommends places to eat. I would strongly recommend this book for people visiting or living in Kyoto. We decided to follow the Shugakuin area walk, and although we ended up deviating from it quite a bit this book was definitely a great starting point; I hadn’t heard of any of these temples before.

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Today I will talk about two of the temples we saw and soon I’ll write about the rest; we visited 6 temples and got 4 stamps which is probably a personal best for me! It also only took about 3 hours to go round all of them. Observe my wonderful map to see where we went.

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The first temple we went to wasn’t actually on the walk route at all, but google maps informed me it was nearby, and as we were keen to see as many temples as possible, we stopped to check it out. This temple was Donyu-ji 道入寺, a temple dedicated to the tiger, the third animal of the Chinese zodiac. This temple is part of a 12 temple pilgrimage around Kyoto, with each temple dedicated to one of the animals of the Chinese zodiac.

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The purpose of the pilgrimage is to honour the god Myoken, the bodhisattva that is the incarnation of the North star. This was a popular pilgrimage prior to 1868 but its practice waned with the anti-Buddhist campaigns in the early Meiji period (see this post for more information on the division of Shinto and Buddhism in 1868). This practice was revived by the Nichiren Buddhist sect in 1986 and is now a relatively popular pilgrimage circuit in Kyoto.

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The idea is that you start your pilgrimage at the temple of your birth sign, I would be the rooster as I was born in 1993. You can also start it on the current Chinese zodiac year, which is currently the year of the horse (it will become the year of the sheep in February). I failed to start on either so I haven’t done it properly and probably won’t get any long life or happiness out of it. I would still like to visit all the temples, as I like the animals. The temples on the pilgrimage route sell a scroll that you can get stamped at each temple on the pilgrimage, it cost 3,500円 so I decided to pass.

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There were quite a few tiger pictures in the temple and a very nice garden out the back. We had to ring the bell to get our stamps done but the lady was very nice and complemented us on our Japanese as old ladies are wont to do.

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The fat tiger statue in the entranceway was supposed to bring long life and happiness. I’m not sure if fat tigers in the wild have long happy lives, perhaps those in captivity do though. I’m sure there’s a poignant message on today’s society or the meaning of life there somewhere.

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The second temple we visited was North of Donyu-ji, and was much larger. I kept calling it the ‘mossy temple’ when I was sorting my pictures for this post because it was very lush and green everywhere around the temple. It was slightly higher up towards the mountains and was submerged in nature in a way that temples in the town are not. It is located in the North-East, the so called ‘Devil’s Gate’ 表鬼門 direction, infamous in Chinese tradition for letting in bad luck and evil spirits. This temple is said to guard the city from these spirits.

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This temple was Sekizan Zenin 赤山禅院, a Buddhist temple belonging to the Tendai sect, which was founded in 888. Like most temples it has its foundation story. The famous monk Ennin, a great priest of the Tendai school, travelled to China to bring back important Buddhist texts. Upon his return his ship was turned back twice by terrible storms. Desperate to return to Japan alive, Ennin prayed to the god Sekizan Myojin, a Chinese god, promising that should he return safely to Japan he would build a temple in the god’s honour.

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Ennin returned safely to Japan on the third try but he became busy with Tendai business and failed to construct the temple to the god that had helped him. On his deathbead he requested that a temple be built in Sekizan Myojin’s honour, resulting in the construction of Sekizan Zenin. Some scholars question the existence of a Chinese god of that name and suggest that the god Sekizan Myojin was made up in the conflict between the mountain and temple schools of Tendai Buddhism; the temple branch already exclusively had the god Shinra, so perhaps Sekizan was invented to even up the playing field.

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 In addition to the god Sekizan, the temple is also dedicated to the god Fukurokuju 福禄寿, the god of longevity. His name literally means ‘happiness’ 福 ‘Wealth’ 禄 and ‘longevity’ 寿. He is the opposite of our friend Myogen of the Zodiac, in that he is the incarnation of the Southern Pole-star. He is probably an amalgamation of the Chinese three pole star gods, Fu, Lu and Shou, that also represent happiness, wealth and longevity. Fukurokuju is often depicted carrying a book which is said to contain the lifespans of every person. He is represented by animals that symbolise longevity, a crane and a turtle, as well as a black deer because deer are said to go black if they are over 2000 years old (probably because they are zombies). There were statues of Fukurokuju and his friends, the other 6 gods of fortune, everywhere in the temple. I  think his rather phallic head is meant to represent how wise he is, though if I were him I’d get a brain scan or something just to be safe.

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The temple was fun to explore with many small shrines in the woods as well as some larger buildings. The architectural styles were both Shinto and Buddhist, showing that they used to be intertwined religions. Definitely a good temple to visit as there is lots to see, all surrounded by a beautiful forest which is presumably fantastic in Autumn. Also its free!

京都 Snapshots: December

I have had quite a busy December in terms of work and socialising and as such I don’t have a great deal of snapshots. Most of what I’ve been up to has slotted neatly into single blog posts. However I do have some tiny temples left over as well as some pictures of the snow for your enjoyment. My third month in Japan was great and I was lucky enough to experience snow in Kyoto twice!

Takoyakushido Eifukuji Temple 蛸薬師堂 妙心寺

This temple is located in a busy shopping area near Sanjo. The area has many different shops and is also covered, which was great because the snow and ice made it very hard to walk outside. Though the snow looked beautiful, walking around in it was a different story. Walking to university I saw a tragic sight: a man was walking his dog down a very icy street. The street was like a rough ice-rink, I was sliding everywhere and I was worried I might slip into the ditch at the side of the road. The man’s dog was not doing so well, falling over quite a bit, but the man kept pulling the dog onwards. As I carefully navigated my way around them I realised that the dog only had one front leg, making walking on the ice impossible. The poor dog kept getting up and trying its best, as dogs are animals that do not give up. Thankfully soon after the owner crossed to the non-icy side of the road (the sun had melted the ice) and the dog had some respite. Poor dog.  Basically, walking around outside was not a great idea in that weather but I digress.

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The temple appeared small from the outside and I thought it would be a simple matter of walking around a small area and getting my stamp done, but actually there was a narrow corridor back to a courtyard where there were some statues and another place to pray. It is dedicated to Yakushi Nyorai, the Buddhist God of healing.

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This temple was founded in the 13th Century, with the official name of Eifuku-ji. It got its second name of Takoyakushido a few hundred years later. The temple had been known to the people as Takuyakushido, where ‘taku’ means marsh, denoting the area where it stood. Tako means Octopus, and this is the tale of the octopus temple.

There was a monk studying at the temple named Zenko whose mother was very sick. He tried to nurse her back to health but nothing worked. She told him that she remembered eating octopus in her childhood and said that maybe if she had some she would get better. Zenko, being a Buddhist monk, was not allowed to buy living things to eat, but he was so desperate to save his mother that he took a wooden box to the market and bought octopus. As he carried the box back to the temple people grew suspicious and demanded to know what was inside. Zenko, unable to refuse, prayed to the god of healing for help, and when he opened the box the octopus had transformed into the eight volumes of the Lotus Sutra. People were amazed and praised him and soon after his mother was miraculously cured. Since that incident the temple was known as the Octopus temple, with the ‘taku’ in its name turning into ‘tako’.

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Anyoji 安養寺

This is a very small temple in the same vicinity as Takoyakushido, just opposite an arcade. I thought it was a proper temple with stamps but it was quite confusing. There was a small portable shrine on the ground floor with all the information about the temple but we couldn’t find the actual official temple. It turned out to be up a rather treacherous flight of steps which were covered in snow. We made it up the steps and found the inner part of the temple with its statues and incense. Sadly, I wasn’t allowed to take any pictures of this part, but there were several golden statues inside that made the stairs worth it.

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This temple also has a foundation story. The story goes that the monks carved a lotus pedestal for the statue of the Buddha but it seemed as if it was going to break when the statue was placed. They ended up placing the lotus upside-down and it did not break. As a result the temple became famous for its upside-down lotus flower. This became a symbol of salvation for women; there was the belief that women, being inferior to men and stupid according to ancient Buddhism, had the lotuses in their minds upside-down and therefore could not enter the Pure Land. Women would go to pray for salvation at this temple in order to enter the Pure Land (or be reborn as a man, because then you are good to go).

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Anyoji was founded in 1018 in Nara, but was moved to Kyoto in 1110. It was finally moved to its present location by Toyotomi Hideyoshi in 1580. I wouldn’t really recommend visiting it as there isn’t much to it,

Snow!

Though it was hard to walk around outside I did take a brief trip around my local neighbourhood to look at the snow. The snow was so early that there were even a few red leaves left here and there. Here are a few pictures from that trip.

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That concludes my December snapshots. Somewhat short but hopefully next month I will have more to share with you. I visited some great temples yesterday so new posts on that coming soon!