Myoo-in Temple

A Working Temple in the Katsuragawa Gorge

Myōōin (明王院, also written Myōō-in and widely known as Katsuragawa Myōōin 葛川明王院) is a Tendai Buddhist temple at Bōmura-chō in the Katsuragawa district of Ōtsu City, Shiga Prefecture, whose four surviving halls, raised between the early seventeenth century and 1834, were designated Important Cultural Properties on 9 December 1993. Its full ceremonial name is Ado-san Kassenji Sokushō Myōōin (阿都山葛川寺息障明王院); the registered religious corporation is simply Myōōin.

The approach tells you something before you reach the gate. From Katata Station the bus climbs for forty-five minutes along the Adogawa valley, following the old Wakasa Kaidō, the salt-and-mackerel road that linked Kyoto with the Sea of Japan. Cedar closes in. The last stretch runs beside the Myōōdani, a tributary that drops out of the Hira mountains, and the temple sits on its north bank on ground terraced with stone.

Four buildings carry the designation. The Hondō (main hall) was rebuilt in 1715, three bays across the front and five deep, with an irimoya hipped-and-gabled roof and a karahafu undulating gable on its west side. Below it stand the Gomadō, a hall for fire ritual rebuilt in 1755 with a square hōgyō pyramidal roof, and the Anshitsu of 1834, a matted building measuring 8.7 by 4.9 metres where practitioners sleep during retreat. The Mandokoro Omotemon, a munemon gate with a gabled roof, is the oldest structure on site; the Agency for Cultural Affairs assigns it to the Momoyama period, early seventeenth century.

The temple traces its founding to 859, when the monk Sōō (831 to 918) is said to have come here from Mudōji on Mount Hiei looking for a place hard enough to practise in. Sōō is credited by the Tendai school with originating the kaihōgyō, the circuit walking discipline in which a monk covers thirty to eighty kilometres of mountain path a day for a hundred days at a stretch.

Why the Ground Was Designated Along With the Buildings

Most architectural designations in Japan cover a structure and stop at the sill. Here the listing extends to the land: retaining walls, stone fences and stairways across a precinct of roughly 9,500 square metres, together with the adjoining grounds of Jishu Shrine. Reports on the designation give that figure; the Agency's own database records the buildings individually and treats the site as a unit.

The reason is legibility. A picture scroll drawn in 1317 and 1318 to settle a boundary dispute with the neighbouring estate of Ikadachi shows the temple laid out on its terraces, and the arrangement of halls, gate and levels has barely shifted since. Standing on the stone steps between the Gomadō and the Hondō, you are looking at a medieval plan that was never overwritten.

Conservation work carried out by the Shiga Prefectural Board of Education between November 2005 and March 2011 changed what the buildings look like today. Dismantling the Hondō turned up members reused from an earlier hall; dendrochronology dated the timber to around 1100, pushing the physical fabric of the building back six centuries before its rebuilding date. The same work recovered evidence that the original roof had been tochi-buki, thick hand-split shingles laid in courses. That treatment was reserved at Enryakuji for major buildings such as the Konpon Chūdō, which suggests where Katsuragawa sat in the Tendai hierarchy. The Hondō was reroofed in tochi-buki, and the other three halls in kokera-buki, the thinner shingle. Anyone comparing the buildings against the database will notice a mismatch: the official record still describes them as sheet-metal roofed, the condition at the time of designation in 1993.

The temple's holdings matter as much as its architecture. The Katsuragawa Myōōin monjo runs to 4,336 documents beginning in 1117, an unusually complete record of how a mountain village and a temple governed each other. Alongside them are 501 sanrōfuda, stupa-shaped wooden tablets left by those who completed retreat here; the oldest is dated 1204 and stands 391 centimetres tall, and the shoguns Ashikaga Yoshimitsu and Yoshihisa and Yoshihisa's mother Hino Tomiko are among the names. The three principal images, a standing Thousand-Armed Kannon flanked by Bishamonten and Fudō Myōō, are attributed to the twelfth century.

What to Look For

Cross the bridge from Jishu Shrine and the first thing on your left is the Mandokoro compound, its gate set on a steep stone base. The Omotemon is small and plainly framed, two posts and a gabled roof, which is precisely why it survived the fires and rebuildings that took everything else.

The Gomadō is painted vermilion and reads brightly against the cedar. Its pyramidal roof rises to a single point, the form used for halls where the goma fire rite is performed. Next to it, the Anshitsu is domestic by comparison, an entrance porch on the front and tatami inside; the contrast between a hall built for fire and a building built for sleep says a good deal about what a retreat centre actually needs.

Take the stone steps beside the Gomadō. The Hondō sits on the level above, and its arrangement is worth pausing over: the hall faces south, but the only entrance is on the west face. There is no door where you expect one. Inside, a three-by-three sanctuary sits behind a three-by-two worship space, the standard Tendai division between where the images are and where people are.

Visiting hours are 9:00 to 16:30 and admission is free. A goma ritual is held in the Hondō at 14:00 on the eighteenth of each month except July, which is open to anyone who turns up. July is the exception because the summer retreat, the gean-go, occupies the temple from the 16th to the 20th; on the night of the 18th, the taiko-mawashi takes place, in which practitioners spin a drum more than a metre across and leap from it, re-enacting Sōō's plunge into the pool below Sannotaki.

No official statement on photography is posted. Exteriors are routinely photographed from the precinct, but for interiors and for the July observances, ask at the temple first.

Across the stream, Jishu Shrine keeps a honden of 1502 in the sangensha kasuga style, the only example of that form in Shiga, listed as an Important Cultural Property together with its heiden. It takes two minutes to reach and rounds out the visit. Snow lies here into April, and the buses are few, so check the timetable before you commit to the trip.