Gyokuhoin Garden

Gyokuho-in Garden: A Karesansui Hidden Within Myoshin-ji's Founding Sub-Temple

Behind the brick-walled lanes of Myoshin-ji in northwestern Kyoto sits Gyokuho-in, the oldest of the temple's forty-six sub-temples and one of the few that almost no visitor ever sees. Its dry-landscape garden, designated in July 1931 as both a Place of Scenic Beauty and a Historic Site, wraps around the founder's hall on three sides. Each side answers the architecture in a different voice: a long stretch of raked white sand to the south, a tight arrangement of upright stones suggesting Mount Hōrai to the north, and a quieter composition of placed rocks to the east.

Gyokuho-in stands at the spot where the Hanazono Detached Palace once stood. Emperor Hanazono, after taking Buddhist vows in 1335, invited the Zen master Kanzan Egen here and converted the palace into what would become Myoshin-ji. The garden took its present form during the mid-Edo period, several centuries after the temple's founding, and the careful way it threads between the medieval founder's hall and the seventeenth-century abbot's quarters tells you exactly how seriously the designers treated the buildings on every side.

The Setting: Bishō-an and the Oldest Buildings at Myoshin-ji

To read the garden you have to know what stands within it. The founder's hall, Bishō-an, was relocated from Tōfuku-ji in 1537 and is the oldest standing building anywhere on the Myoshin-ji grounds. It is a small structure in mid-Muromachi karayō style, with the dense, layered bracket complexes that distinguish that idiom. Inside, an eternal lamp and a perpetual incense burner mark the seat of Kanzan Egen, the temple's founder.

The hōjō, or abbot's quarters, was rebuilt in 1656 in a style modeled on a retired emperor's palace, a deliberate gesture of imperial association in keeping with the temple's origin. Its checkered plan opens onto the garden through wide verandas. Connecting these two buildings is a roofed corridor that bisects the karesansui itself, so that the white-sand south garden and the densely composed north garden are read as separate scenes from inside the same complex.

Behind the founder's hall and accessible only on special viewings stands a four-legged Chinese-style gate, the karamon, also designated an Important Cultural Property and traditionally said to have been donated by the Osaka merchant Yodoya Tatsugorō in the Kanbun era (1661–1673). A bronze bell in the belfry bears a casting date of 1610.

Reading the Three Gardens

The official designation describes the garden as a work of the mid-Tokugawa period divided into three discrete sections. The wording in the cultural property record is unusually precise, and walking the garden in person makes its logic clear.

The south garden, between the founder's hall and the small hermitage in front of it, is the broadest and the most photographed of the three, though for years no photography has been permitted at all. White sand is laid flat across the rectangle. A line of pines runs along its length, and in front of the hermitage stand two stone lanterns of the type known as Myoshin-ji-gata, a distinctive lantern shape associated with this temple.

The north garden, tucked between the founder's hall and the hōjō, is the densest. It is composed in the Hōrai style, the Zen idiom of stone arrangements alluding to the immortal isles of Chinese cosmology. A dry waterfall is built up of vertical stones on the far side, and the foreground is more reserved, designed to be read in fragments from the corridor as one passes through. Within this area is the Fūsuisen, an old well where, by temple tradition, Kanzan Egen died standing in 1360.

The east garden, beyond Bishō-an, is the smallest and the quietest. Here the cultural property record simply notes that the stones are skillfully placed, a quality the visitor confirms only by spending time in front of them.

Why the Dual Designation Matters

Many Japanese gardens carry the title of Place of Scenic Beauty alone. The further designation as a Historic Site reflects what surrounds the karesansui as much as the karesansui itself. The grounds hold the memorial mausoleum of Tsurumatsu, the young son of Toyotomi Hideyoshi who died at the age of three in 1591; stone stupas commemorating Takeda Shingen, his son Katsuyori, and other Takeda family members; and a separate pair of stupas for Oda Nobunaga and his son Nobutada. These are the warlords whose rivalries reshaped late sixteenth-century Japan, and their commemorations sit a few paces apart in a small sub-temple garden in Kyoto. The designation acknowledges that the place is not merely beautiful but historically dense in a way few gardens are.

That density is also why Gyokuho-in keeps its doors closed. The interior of the temple, its painted screens (works attributed to the Kanō school painters Yasunobu and Masunobu, including a Kirin and a dragon), and the garden are released to the public only during limited special openings, most often as part of the winter and summer non-public cultural property programs organized for Kyoto.

Around Gyokuho-in: The Greater Myoshin-ji Compound

Myoshin-ji is one of the largest Zen temple compounds in Japan, with a central axis of monumental buildings (the Sanmon gate, Buddha Hall, Lecture Hall and the great Hattō with its ceiling painting of a dragon by Kanō Tan'yū) and dozens of sub-temples lining a grid of walled lanes. Several other sub-temples are open year-round and reward visits: Taizō-in, with its early-Muromachi painting Catching a Catfish with a Gourd and a famous dry garden; Daishin-in, a smaller temple with a quiet pond garden; and Keishun-in, often praised for its weeping cherry and Edo-period stroll garden.

The neighborhood of Hanazono itself, taking its name from the emperor who founded the temple, is unhurried and largely residential. The nearest station, Hanazono on the JR Sagano Line, is roughly five minutes' walk from the south gate of Myoshin-ji. From there it is a further ten-minute walk through the temple grounds to reach Gyokuho-in. The compound is also walkable from Arashiyama and from Ninna-ji and Ryōan-ji in the Kitano direction, both of which are within a half-hour stroll.