Miidera, or the Onjō-ji, features as the eighth destination in Alex Kerr’s latest book, Hidden Japan: An Astonishing World of Thatched Villages, Ancient Shrines and Primeval Forests. As the temple is just “hidden in plain sight”, the taxi driver has no difficulty in finding it – it would have been an easy walk from the station, but every minute counts now that we’re halfway through the afternoon.
With nary a millisecond to waste, I walk through the Daimon Gate – repurposed from Hideyoshi’s Fushimi Castle – and up the stone steps to the courtyard in front of the Kondo. This great hall was built in 1599 with funds donated by Hideyoshi’s widow. Regime change seems to have done this great temple no harm at all.
The Kondo, Kerr writes, is “one of the most splendid Momoyama buildings in existence …expansive and strong, yet delicate and light.”
Alas, the late afternoon backlighting, not to mention the distracting highlights of the flowering trees, reduce the otherwise graceful hall to a black hulk. So I give up on architectural appreciation, scuff off my shoes, and go inside.
Halfway round our clockwise shuffle around the hall, we come to a dark corner. And there, as if carefully segregated from the fine and polished examples of classical statuary all about, are seven figures that look as if they were roughly hewn out of a discarded log. The labels identify each one as a “dragon king” (or queen), and each wears a gentle yet engaging smile.
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| Image courtesy of Miidera1200 (Instagram) |
I make a slight bow in their direction. This is by way of an apology. In One Hundred Mountains of Japan, the English version of Fukada Kyūya’s Nihon Hyakumeizan, mention is made of a wandering monk called Enku (1632–1695), said to have been the first to climb Kasa-ga-dake in the Northern Alps: “This is the monk,” says the translation, “who with a hatchet carved an image of the Buddha that latterly became famous.”
One image? That should have read thousands. Enku himself vowed to carve 120,000 religious effigies during his lifetime, and he may well have done so. Ten a day could have sufficed, one scholar has calculated. At any rate, something like 4,320 of his sculptures survive. These include the seven in front of me, which were rediscovered as recently as 1963, in a niche above the Miidera’s revolving sutra repository.
As this history suggests, both Enku and his works fell into obscurity after his death. It was only in the 1930s that scholars started to take an interest in him, and not until the late 1950s – just before Fukada started writing Nihon Hyakumeizan – that big museums began to exhibit Enku’s statues.
As a result, Enku’s origins are difficult to establish. He grew up in Mino Province, in the southern reaches of what is today’s Gifu Prefecture. When he was seven years old, his mother may or may not have perished in a great flood. Later he took religious orders in the Tendai sect and started undertaking mountain pilgrimages in all parts of the realm.
A visit to Hakusan in June 1679 seems to have been particularly revelatory. While Enku was meditating beneath a waterfall, the Hakusan deity appeared to him and announced “Here lives Shaka.” From this time forward, says Julian Daizan Skinner, a modern Rinzai Zen master, “his work is considered to take on a new depth and excellence.”
Curiously, it was in the very next month that Enku came here to the Onjō-ji and received the "Succession Lineage of the Buddha-nature Eternal Vajra Castle" from the hands of the Great Abbot Dōei himself. This, and we seem to be on firm historical ground here, was on July 5th of the seventh year of Enpō (1679). The Hōryū-ji in Nara had bestowed a similar honour on him a few years previously.
As Alex Kerr notes, Enku did not often seek out the great prelates of Kyoto and Nara. He preferred to make the rounds of country villages, offering his services as a traditional healer or performing ceremonies to end a drought. However, Kerr suggests, he may have made an exception for the Miidera on account of its “mystical Mikkyō teachings”. Enku visited the temple again in August 1689 and received a further transmission, this time from the Abbot Son’ei.
Tradition has it that Enku ended his days far from the big cities. Returning to his hometown in Gifu, he had a cave dug into the banks of the Nagara River and entered into his final meditation there – at the very same place where his mother had been swept away in a great flood so many years before.
By the time I leave the Kondo, the sun has set behind the bulk of Hiei-zan. At least the sakura are less distracting, now that the shadows have muted them.
There’s just time for a last quick circuit of the temple grounds. Last of all, I pass the sacred spring that gives the Onjō-ji the name that everybody knows it by: Miidera, the temple of the three wells.
Now it really is time to run for that evening Thunderbird before that Rail Pass turns into a pumpkin….
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