Gyokuhoin Kaizando

The Founder's Hall of Myōshin-ji, Hidden Inside Its Oldest Subtemple

Walk through the vast precinct of Myōshin-ji in western Kyoto and you pass a Buddhist city: a great Dharma hall, a Buddha hall, and more than forty subtemples lined along stone-paved lanes. Tucked toward the eastern edge of all this, behind the subtemple Tōkai-an, stands Gyokuhōin, the oldest of those subtemples. Within its walls is a single-story hall capped by a hip-and-gable tiled roof, known by the name Mishōan. This is the Kaisandō, the Founder's Hall of the entire monastery, and the building inside it is the oldest one standing anywhere at Myōshin-ji today.

The hall enshrines Kanzan Egen (1277–1361), the monk who founded Myōshin-ji. Retired Emperor Hanazono, who had turned his Hagiwara detached palace into a Zen temple, invited Kanzan to serve as founding abbot, and the two are said to have sharpened their understanding of Zen together on this very ground. Gyokuhōin grew up beside the palace site as the temple's first subtemple, which is why the founder of the whole monastery is honored here rather than at the central halls.

The name Mishōan, the "Hermitage of the Smile," reaches back to a Zen story. When the Buddha once held up a single flower before his assembly, only his disciple Mahākāśyapa understood and smiled, and in that wordless exchange the teaching passed from master to student. The neighboring abbot's quarters carry the same idea in a room called the Nengeshitsu, the "Room of the Held Flower."

Why the Hall Was Designated

The Kaisandō was registered as an Important Cultural Property on March 27, 1901, placing it among the very first generation of buildings the Japanese government chose to protect. The structure itself was built in the mid-Muromachi period, sometime between 1393 and 1466, but it did not begin life at Myōshin-ji. It was an older hall at Tōfuku-ji, the great Zen monastery in eastern Kyoto, and was dismantled and moved here in 1537. Some records describe the move as taking place in the opening years of the Tenbun era rather than precisely in its sixth year.

That relocation explains a quiet historical fact. The original buildings of Gyokuhōin burned during the Ōnin War of the late fifteenth century, the conflict that reduced much of Kyoto to ash. By bringing in a surviving Muromachi hall from Tōfuku-ji decades later, the temple gave its founder a home older than almost anything else that had been rebuilt around it. Architectural historians regard the hall as a representative example of a single-story, three-bay Zen-style hall, a compact form developed for exactly this kind of memorial use.

What to Look For

The roof is the first thing to read. It is an irimoya, a hip-and-gable form, covered in heavy formal roof tiles laid in the older hongawara manner. Below the eaves, the bracket complexes are unusually robust for so small a building, a hallmark of the Zen architectural style imported from Song-dynasty China and adapted in Japanese monasteries.

Inside, the plan is disarmingly simple. The hall is three bays across the front and four bays deep, yet it opens into a single undivided room. The floor is paved with square tiles set on the diagonal, a pattern called shihanjiki that gives the dim interior a taut, formal rhythm. At the worship station toward the rear sits the seated image of Kanzan Egen, and before it burn a perpetual lamp and a continuously smoldering incense board, the kind once used to mark the hours in a monastery.

Step back into the small front garden and two details reward a pause. One is a stone lantern of an unusual squat shape now known as the Myōshin-ji type, the other a sago palm whose stiff fronds look almost out of place beside a Zen hall. Beyond them rises a four-legged gate, also an Important Cultural Property, that frames the approach to the founder's hall.

Around Gyokuhōin

The Kaisandō does not stand alone. A covered corridor links it to the abbot's quarters, or Hōjō, itself an Important Cultural Property rebuilt in 1656 in the manner of a retired emperor's residence, with a cypress-bark roof and sliding-door paintings attributed to artists of the Kanō school. Inside, a hall holds a wooden image of Retired Emperor Hanazono, and the upper room preserves a dais said to have served as his seat.

The dry landscape garden that wraps the buildings is designated a national Historic Site and Place of Scenic Beauty. Among its features is a well called the Fūsuisen, where Kanzan Egen is said to have died standing upright. Deeper in the grounds, an unexpected gathering waits: the memorial chapel of Toyotomi Hideyoshi's young son Tsurumatsu, who died at the age of three, stands near memorial pagodas for the warlords Takeda Shingen and his son Katsuyori, and for Oda Nobunaga and his son Nobutada. Rivals in life, they are remembered side by side here.

Gyokuhōin is normally closed to the public. It opens only during occasional special viewings, most often the winter cultural-property campaign run by the city, when visitors can enter the Hōjō and the Kaisandō under guidance. Photography inside is not permitted. The temple sits a short walk from the rest of Myōshin-ji, reached on foot in about nine minutes from Hanazono Station on the JR Sagano Line, or five minutes from the Myōshinji-mae bus stop.