Kyoogokokuji Temple Daishi Hall (Saiin Myoeido Hall)

A Hall That Began as a Monk's House

Every morning at six o'clock, before most of Kyoto has stirred, a tray bearing rice, a second course, and tea is carried into a low hall in the northwest corner of To-ji and set down as though for a living guest. The guest is Kukai, the monk known after his death as Kobo Daishi, who died in 835 and whom the Shingon tradition holds to be not dead but sealed in eternal meditation. The hall where this daily meal is offered was once his actual living quarters.

It is called the Mieido, the Portrait Hall, though the name on its National Treasure listing is Daishido, the Master's Hall. The temple itself prefers Mieido. The building sits inside a walled enclosure called the Saiin, the western precinct, set a little apart from the great ceremonial halls that line the main north-south axis of the grounds. Unlike those halls, it can be entered free of charge, and the ritual offering, known as shojinku, has been repeated here without a break for centuries.

Two Building Campaigns, One Quiet Whole

The structure visitors see today is not the original. Kukai's quarters burned in 1379, and the rear portion of the present hall, the kodo, was put up the very next year. A decade later, in 1390, a front hall and a connecting middle gate were added on the north side to house a newly important image of the master himself. The hall was assembled in two stages a generation apart, yet it reads as a single, settled composition.

What earned the building its standing is not grandeur but the opposite. Its makers kept the proportions and fittings of a residence rather than a temple. The silhouette is low and calm, the rafters along the eaves are plain, and the openings use shitomi, the hinged lattice shutters standard in aristocratic housing of the Heian period, together with tsumado swinging doors and a railed veranda. Roofed entirely in cypress bark, the Mieido preserves the floor plan of a cleric's dwelling inside an esoteric temple compound more faithfully than almost any comparable building. That is what makes it valuable: it is a rare record of how monks actually lived, not how they worshipped.

What to Look For

Two of To-ji's most important sculptures sit inside, divided between the two ends of the hall.

The southern rear hall holds a seated figure of Fudo Myoo, a ninth-century image said to have been Kukai's own devotional icon. It is an absolute secret buddha, kept from public view, and counts among the oldest surviving depictions of the wrathful deity in Japan. Visitors will not see it, but knowing it sits behind the board walls changes how the dim interior feels.

The northern front hall holds the seated portrait statue of Kobo Daishi that gives the building its name. It was carved in 1233 by Kosho, the fourth son of the great sculptor Unkei, and is said to follow closely a likeness painted by one of Kukai's own disciples. This is the image before which the morning meal is placed.

The pleasure of a visit lies in how architecture and living devotion overlap. To join the shojinku, gather near the gate by about 5:50. At the close of the rite, relics that Kukai is said to have carried back from Tang China are touched briefly to the head and hands of those present. On the north side, worshippers may step up into the outer sanctuary and look in.

The Wider Temple and Getting There

The Mieido is one stop within a temple that rewards a longer stay. To-ji was founded in 796, two years after the imperial capital moved to Heian-kyo, the city now called Kyoto. It is the only vestige of that original capital still standing on its founding ground. Emperor Saga granted it to Kukai in 823, and it became the headquarters of Shingon Buddhism, which it remains today.

The grounds hold the tallest wooden pagoda in Japan, a five-story tower of about 54.8 meters rebuilt in 1644, and a lecture hall where twenty-one statues are set out as a three-dimensional mandala, a sculptural diagram of esoteric teaching that Kukai is said to have planned from this very residence. The complex was inscribed as part of the Historic Monuments of Ancient Kyoto on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1994.

On the twenty-first of each month, the anniversary of Kukai's death, the grounds fill for the Kobo-ichi, one of Japan's largest temple markets, with stalls of antiques, crafts, and food. The temple is about a fifteen-minute walk from the Hachijo exit of Kyoto Station, or ten minutes on foot from To-ji Station on the Kintetsu line.