Chikurinji Temple Main Hall

A Muromachi Hall on the Hill Named for a Chinese Mountain

Chikurinji Hondo (竹林寺本堂, also written Chikurin-ji Hondō), the main hall of Chikurinji temple at Godaisan in Kochi City, Kochi Prefecture, is a Buddhist hall of the late Muromachi period that was designated an Important Cultural Property on 29 August 1904.

Almost nobody at the temple calls it the Hondo. The building is known locally as the Monjudo (文殊堂), the Hall of Monju, after the bodhisattva of wisdom enshrined at its centre. Chikurinji is the thirty-first stop on the Shikoku pilgrimage circuit of eighty-eight temples, and the only one of the eighty-eight whose principal image is Monju Bosatsu. Students sitting entrance examinations come here in numbers that surprise visitors expecting a quiet mountain temple.

The hill itself carries a borrowed name. Godaisan, at 145 metres, was named for Mount Wutai in Shanxi, the great Chinese centre of Monju devotion. Temple tradition holds that Emperor Shomu dreamed of worshipping Monju on that Chinese peak and ordered the monk Gyoki to find a Japanese hill resembling it; Gyoki is said to have settled on this rise above Urado Bay in 724 (Jinki 1), carved a Monju image from sandalwood, and built a hall to house it. Kukai is said to have stayed here early in the ninth century. The documentary record for any of this is thin, and the temple's actual founding date remains unsettled.

The dating of the standing building is unsettled in a different way. The Agency for Cultural Affairs assigns it to the late Muromachi period, somewhere between 1467 and 1572. The temple's own account credits Yamauchi Tadayoshi, second lord of the Tosa domain, with building it in 1644. The two datings have not been reconciled in the public record, and a visitor is best served by holding both in mind: a hall whose structural logic belongs to the fifteenth or sixteenth century, standing in a temple that the Yamauchi lords rebuilt and endowed heavily in the seventeenth.

Not the Other Chikurinji Hondo

A warning worth issuing before anything else. There is a second Important Cultural Property named Chikurinji Hondo, in Kawachi-cho, Higashihiroshima City, Hiroshima Prefecture. That one is a three-bay hall of 1511 with a hipped roof, designated in 1982. Search engines and reference works mix the two constantly. The Kochi hall is the larger of the pair, five bays square, with a hip-and-gable roof, and its designation predates the Hiroshima hall by seventy-eight years.

That 1904 date matters. The designation came under the Ancient Shrines and Temples Preservation Law of 1897, which makes the Monjudo one of the earliest buildings in Kochi Prefecture to receive national protection. It arrived at a low point in the temple's fortunes. The anti-Buddhist upheavals of the early Meiji years had emptied and impoverished Chikurinji, and a typhoon in 1899 brought down the three-storied pagoda and damaged much else. The priest Funaoka Hoshin, installed in 1897, spent decades travelling the country raising funds and petitioning ministries; the precinct was reorganised during his tenure, and the main hall is said to have been moved up to its present terrace from a position facing the Nio gate.

Zen Detailing on a Shingon Hall

The Monjudo measures five bays across the front and five bays deep, a single storey under a hip-and-gable roof of kokerabuki, thin overlapping shingles split from wood rather than tiled or thatched. A one-bay kohai porch projects over the south front, unusually wide for its single bay, with steps below it and a veranda running around all four sides.

Look up at the eaves and the vocabulary turns Zen. The rafters fan outward from the corners in the manner called ogidaruki. The brackets are futatesaki, two-stepped, and packed shoulder to shoulder in the tsumegumi arrangement rather than sitting only above the columns. The doors at the centre three bays of the front are sankarado, framed and panelled in the Chinese manner, with latticed renjimado windows at the flanking bays. None of this is what one expects of a Shingon esoteric temple, and the borrowing tells you something about how completely Zen construction technique had spread through fifteenth-century Japan, carried by carpenters rather than by doctrine.

The interior repays slow looking. The inner sanctuary occupies three bays square, wrapped by an aisle, with the front run of bays widened to one and a half times the normal spacing. A rainbow beam spans that widened run, carrying a bulbous taiheizuka strut above it. The ceiling treatment shifts as you move: a flat kagami-tenjo panel over the front half of the inner sanctuary, exposed rafters left visible as keshoyaneura on the other three sides. Over the innermost chamber the ceiling becomes a coffered grid, and at its centre a single bay is raised into a coved mirror panel painted with heavenly beings performing court music.

The boundary between inner and outer sanctuary uses three different door types across its width: diamond-patterned transom lattice above the central three bays, agejitomido shutters that lift and hook below, and mairado sliding panels at the two end bays. Behind the innermost chamber a board wall closes the rear, with the miniature shrine of the principal image at its centre and vertical mounting rails to either side for hanging painted Buddhist images. Kochi City's cultural properties office describes this rear arrangement as a manner of worship particular to Tosa. It is the kind of regional detail that never appears in general architectural histories and is easy to walk past without noticing.

Visiting the Hall

Entry to the precinct and worship at the main hall are free, and the gates are open from 8:00 to 17:00 daily. This matters because two of Chikurinji's other attractions are ticketed and the main hall is not: the treasure house costs 400 yen for adults, the designated scenic garden 500 yen, and a combined ticket 800 yen, with both open 8:30 to 17:00 and half price for junior high school students and under. Preschool children enter free. A visitor with an hour to spare and no budget can still stand in front of the Monjudo, which is the building this article is about.

The principal Monju image is a hidden buddha, kept closed in its shrine and shown on a fifty-year cycle. A substitute image stands where worshippers can see it. The last scheduled opening was in 2014 for the twelve-hundredth anniversary of the pilgrimage circuit, with an unscheduled opening in spring 2023 marking thirteen centuries since the temple's traditional founding; the next scheduled one falls in 2064. Anyone hoping to see the original should plan a long life or watch for special exhibitions.

The roof is worth a glance for a practical reason. Kokerabuki shingles have a working life measured in decades, and the Monjudo's covering was renewed in 2015 after twenty-seven years. The shingles are still relatively young, their edges crisp, the surface not yet weathered to the silver-grey of an old wood roof.

Getting there is straightforward without a car. The MY-Yu sightseeing bus leaves from Kochi Tabi Hiroba in front of JR Kochi Station and stops at Chikurinji, two or three minutes on foot from the gate. By car it is about twenty minutes from Kochi Interchange or from the station, with roughly a hundred free parking spaces. The mountain road is one-way in places, so overshooting the entrance means going around again.

Photographs of the exterior and the precinct are generally unrestricted, but interior spaces and the treasure house may be posted otherwise, and the notices on site take precedence. Two things nearby deserve the extra hour: the Kochi Prefectural Makino Botanical Garden, immediately next to the temple, and the five-storied pagoda of 1980, 31.2 metres of unpainted cypress rebuilt to replace the pagoda the 1899 typhoon destroyed. Late November brings maples and ginkgo along the stone approach, and the temple holds its autumn festival across a weekend at the end of that month.