Konkai-Komyoji Temple Goei-Do Hall

The Founder's Hall of Konkai Kōmyō-ji

The Mieidō, or Founder's Hall, is the building most visitors picture when they think of Kurodani. It rises near the top of the temple's wooded hill in the Okazaki district of eastern Kyoto, its broad hipped-and-gabled roof of formal tile visible from the long stone stairway below. The hall faces almost due south and measures seven bays across and seven bays deep, with a three-bay worship porch projecting from the front. At a floor area of about 706 square metres, it is the largest of the five Konkai Kōmyō-ji structures added to Japan's register of Tangible Cultural Properties in August 2015.

Konkai Kōmyō-ji is one of the principal head temples of the Jōdo (Pure Land) school of Buddhism. The community traces its beginning to 1175, when the monk Hōnen, then forty-three, came down from the Kurodani valley of Mount Hiei and is said to have chanted the nembutsu on this hillside as purple cloud rose over the slope. That legend gave the mountain its name, Shiun-zan, the Mountain of Purple Cloud, and the place became known as Kurodani. The Founder's Hall enshrines a seated portrait image of Hōnen at the age of seventy-five, which is why the building is also called the Daiden, the Great Hall.

A Shōwa-Era Reconstruction in Classical Dress

The present Founder's Hall is younger than its solemn appearance suggests. Fire swept the upper precinct in 1934, destroying both the earlier Mieidō and the Great Abbot's Quarters beside it. Reconstruction of the main hall was carried out under the direction of Amanuma Shun'ichi, an engineering scholar and Kyoto University professor who had spent his career surveying old temple architecture. He drew on the proportions and bracketing of the Kamakura period to give the new hall the gravity of a medieval building.

The registration record dates the completed structure to 1942 (Shōwa 17). The temple itself, along with many guidebooks, gives 1944 (Shōwa 19) as the year of reconstruction; the difference seems to reflect the gap between structural completion and the hall's formal opening. Either way, the building belongs to the late 1930s and early 1940s, a moment when traditional carpentry techniques were applied at full scale to a major hall. The hall was registered for contributing to the historic landscape of the country, and it is often described in Japanese as a model wooden building of its era.

What sets the Mieidō apart from a simple revival is the care taken with things a worshipper feels rather than counts. Accounts of the reconstruction note that the interior light and the acoustics of the chanting space were both studied closely during design. Stand inside on a clear morning and the point becomes obvious: light reaches the altar without glare, and a recited sutra carries cleanly to the back of the worship hall.

What to Look For

Begin outside, at a distance, where the roofline reads best. The hipped-and-gabled form in formal tile sits on a body built in the wayō, the native Japanese manner, and the eaves are carried on a two-stepped bracket complex with a projecting tail rafter. This is heavier, more architectural bracketing than a smaller hall would need, and it is what gives the Mieidō the bearing of a head temple's main hall rather than a parish building.

Inside, the plan separates a wide, shallow outer worship space from a deep inner sanctuary flanked by two side chapels. The seated image of Hōnen sits at the centre of the inner sanctuary. The hall also holds an Amida Buddha as its principal icon and two figures carried by long tradition: a Monju Bosatsu in the rare "Monju crossing the sea" arrangement, riding a lion at the head of a small procession, and the Kibi Kannon, said to have been carved by the monk Gyōki from sandalwood that the courtier Kibi no Makibi brought home from Tang China. These attributions are devotional traditions rather than documented fact, and they are worth enjoying as such.

The Founder's Hall is the working heart of the temple. Visitors receive the temple's goshuin seal stamp here, and the seal reproduces the imperial plaque phrase granted to Kurodani, "the first gate of the true Pure Land teaching."