Wooden Standing Statue of Thousand-Armed Kannon

A Kannon With Twenty-Seven Faces

The Kannon kept at Hossho-ji is not the figure most visitors expect. A standard Senju Kannon, the thousand-armed form of the bodhisattva of compassion, usually wears eleven small heads. This one carries far more. Counting the wrathful and gentle faces set to either side and the row of small heads stacked above the crown, the image is described as having around twenty-seven faces in all. Temple accounts hold that the same unusual form survives on only one other image in Kyoto, the secret main icon at the inner sanctuary of Kiyomizu-dera.

The statue is carved from a single block of cherry wood and rises about 109.7 centimeters. It dates to the Heian period, and tradition places its making in the Encho era, around 923 to 931. The work is attributed to a sculptor known as the Kasuga busshi, said to have carved it at the request of the courtier Fujiwara no Tadahira. None of this is inscribed on the statue itself, so the date and the maker come down as tradition rather than documented fact. The national database records the image plainly: one statue, in wood, of the Heian period.

Hossho-ji sits in the Higashiyama district of Kyoto, a short walk from Tofuku-ji. Today it is a small nunnery of the Seizan Zenrin-ji branch of the Jodo sect, easy to pass without noticing. The Kannon inside is a National Treasure.

What Is Left of a Vanished Great Temple

The name Hossho-ji once belonged to a far larger institution. Fujiwara no Tadahira founded the original temple in 924 as a clan temple for the Fujiwara, and through the Heian period it grew into one of the major religious complexes of the capital. By the lifetime of Fujiwara no Tadamichi in the twelfth century, its grounds reached across land now occupied by Tofuku-ji and Sennyu-ji, with scores of halls and pagodas counted among the twenty-one great temples of Kyoto. Tadamichi himself took the religious name Hossho-ji Nyudo after the temple.

That grandeur did not last. In 1239 the statesman Kujo Michiie took part of the land to build Tofuku-ji, and the Onin War of the late fifteenth century left the old Hossho-ji in ruins. The buildings burned, the community scattered, and the surviving images were gathered into a small hall. The present temple was rebuilt under the old name after the Meiji Restoration. The Kannon now enshrined in its main hall is said to have served as the principal image of the kanjo-do, the hall of esoteric initiation, in the vanished original temple.

Why It Is a National Treasure

The image was first protected as a national property in April 1903, under the standards of that era, and was redesignated a National Treasure in November 1952 once Japan's postwar cultural property law took effect.

What sets it apart is its form. The thousand arms of a Senju Kannon stand for the bodhisattva's vow to reach every suffering being by every possible means, and the eyes opened in its palms for the wisdom to see each one. Most sculptors expressed this with eleven heads and a fan of forty-two arms, the forty outer arms each standing for twenty-five realms of existence. The Hossho-ji carving multiplies the heads instead, ranging more than twenty small faces above the main head and adding calm and fierce faces at the sides. Specialists place its style at the early stage when Buddhist sculpture in Japan was moving away from continental models toward a softer, more native manner.

What to Look For

Because the statue is a hibutsu, a hidden image kept closed away, you cannot count on seeing it. It is shown only during occasional special openings of Kyoto's normally closed cultural properties, and even its first wide public showing came centuries after it was made. When it is on view, the things worth slowing down for are the faces and the wood.

Look first at the head. The small faces are not identical. Some are serene, others knit their brows in anger, a visual reminder that compassion can take a stern form when it must. Then look at the surface. Unlike the joined-wood images that became standard in later centuries, this one was cut from a single piece of cherry, a hard and close-grained timber that holds fine carving and resists the splitting that troubles softer woods.

The Kannon goes by a nickname as well, the Yakuyoke Kannon, or disaster-averting Kannon. The name comes from a story that Fujiwara no Tadamichi recovered from a grave illness within days of prayers offered before this image. Worshippers have turned to it for protection from misfortune ever since.

Around the Temple

Hossho-ji is the twenty-first stop on the Rakuyo Sanjusansho pilgrimage, a circuit of thirty-three Kannon sites within Kyoto, so it draws a quiet trickle of pilgrims collecting goshuin seals even though the main image stays hidden. The temple is small and run as a nunnery, and visitors are asked to be considerate of that.

The setting makes an easy half day. Tofuku-ji, a few minutes away on foot, is one of Kyoto's great Zen monasteries and is known for the maples in its Tsutenkyo valley. Sennyu-ji, the mortuary temple of the imperial house, lies a little further east. From central Kyoto the area is reached in minutes by train to Tofukuji Station, served by both the JR Nara Line and the Keihan Main Line.