Kyoogokokuji Temple Lotus Gate

The Lotus Flower Gate of Tō-ji

Eight squat round pillars carry the gabled roof of Renge-mon, the Lotus Flower Gate set into the western edge of Tō-ji in Kyoto. The temple's formal name is Kyō-ō-gokoku-ji, and this single-story gate faces Mibu-dōri, the street that runs north to south along the precinct's western wall, well away from the crowds that gather at the southern entrance and the five-story pagoda.

Builders of the period would have called it a sanken-ikko hakkyaku-mon: a gate three bays wide with one central doorway, held up by eight pillars. The roof takes the kirizuma gable form and is finished in hongawara, the heavy paired ceramic tiles reserved for the most formal religious buildings.

The structure dates to the early Kamakura period, roughly the years between 1185 and 1274. Tradition places its construction in the Kenkyū era of the 1190s, though no founding record survives. The Agency for Cultural Affairs listed it as an Important Cultural Property in 1902 and raised it to National Treasure in 1952.

Why a Modest Gate Became a National Treasure

Tō-ji holds towering attractions, and a low side gate is easy to walk past. The recognition comes from how the gate is built rather than how large it is.

When experts assessed Renge-mon, they noted timber cut unusually thick and proportions composed with rare assurance. The rafters sweep upward in a strong curve. The gable boards are slender in width yet finish with a sharp turn at their tips. At each gable end sits a double rainbow beam topped by kaerumata, the frog-leg struts that fill the space beneath a crossbeam. For a Kamakura building these are conspicuously archaic touches, closer to the manner of earlier centuries than to the fashion of the day.

The reading favored by the official assessment is that the carpenters chose to hold to the forms of an older age rather than follow contemporary taste. That deliberate conservatism is precisely what raises the gate above its peers, and the national database goes so far as to call it a masterpiece among the country's eight-legged gates.

The Legend of the Lotus Footprints

The gate owes its name to a story about Kūkai, the monk venerated after death as Kōbō Daishi, who turned Tō-ji into the headquarters of Shingon Esoteric Buddhism. In his last years, the telling goes, he left the temple through this western gate on his journey to Mount Kōya, and lotus blossoms opened in each of his footprints as he walked. Tō-ji's own account adds a further image: Fudō Myō-ō, the fierce guardian Kūkai kept as his personal devotional figure, is said to have appeared at the gate to see him off.

The gate honored in that legend is not the one a visitor photographs today. Kūkai died in the ninth century, while the present structure is an early Kamakura rebuilding raised generations later on the same spot. The name and the memory carried over even as the timber was renewed.

Stand close and the older sensibility shows in the details. The round pillars taper slightly toward the top, a profile that points to the Kamakura period or after. Above them sit simple three-block brackets, and between the beams are plain strut blocks rather than elaborate carving. Hung over the gable is a gegyo, a pendant board pierced by a heart-shaped opening, its lower edge cut into a shape that observers have compared to a whale's tail.

Most of the year you see only one face of the gate. The outer side, turned toward Mibu-dōri, can be viewed from the public street at any hour. The inner side opens onto the garden of the Shōshibō, a residence once used to receive the emperor, and that garden lies inside a closed area. Only during the temple's special spring and autumn openings can the inner face be reached.

Around the Gate

Renge-mon belongs to a precinct that is itself a monument. Tō-ji was founded in the 790s as one of two official temples guarding the new capital of Heian-kyō, set near the great Rajōmon gate alongside its western counterpart, Sai-ji. Sai-ji and the Rajōmon are long gone, which leaves Tō-ji as the single surviving structure from the original plan of the Heian capital. The grounds were named a National Historic Site in 1934 and inscribed in 1994 as part of the World Heritage listing for the Historic Monuments of Ancient Kyoto.

A short walk inside the walls brings you to the landmarks most visitors come for. The five-story pagoda is the tallest wooden tower in Japan. The Kōdō lecture hall holds a three-dimensional mandala of twenty-one sculptures arranged by Kūkai himself, many of them National Treasures. On the twenty-first of each month the grounds fill with the Kōbō-san flea market, a sprawl of antiques, food, and crafts that has run for centuries in memory of the founder.

To reach the gate, walk about ten minutes from Tōji Station on the Kintetsu line, or fifteen minutes west from Kyoto Station. The temple grounds open early, around five in the morning, and close in the late afternoon.