Chofukuji Temple Main Hall

A Dark Hall That Was Once Blazing With Colour

Chofukuji Hondo (長福寺本堂, also written Chōfuku-ji Hondō), the main hall of Chofukuji temple in Tawaraguchi-cho, Ikoma City, Nara Prefecture, is a late Kamakura-period building designated an Important Cultural Property on 5 April 1899. The designation number, 00082, places it among the earliest architectural listings in the country.

The hall measures five bays along the front and three in depth, single-storeyed, roofed in irimoya hipped-and-gabled form with heavy ceramic tiles, and fitted with a one-bay kohai, the projecting canopy that shelters the worship position at the entrance. A lower lean-to runs along the back. The proportions are modest. Nothing about the exterior announces what is inside.

Step in and the plan divides sharply. The front bay forms the gejin, the outer area where lay worshippers stand. Behind it the naijin, the inner sanctuary, holds a broad shumidan altar platform, and two raigo pillars rise from it. Those pillars, the transom boards above the nageshi tie-beams, and the four inner sanctuary posts all carry painted images: ranks of thousand-Buddha figures, celestial beings, bodhisattvas, and scenes of the Amida Buddha descending to receive the dying.

Or rather, they carried them. Centuries of candle smoke and soot have reduced the paintwork to faint traces. Visitors today see brown timber with something ghosting underneath it, visible only when the eye adjusts.

What Infrared Light Found

The hall had been taken apart once before, in 1904, and by the early 2000s the structure was failing again. Ground subsidence had pushed the building out of true. From September 2012 the Nara Prefectural Cultural Properties Conservation Office ran a full dismantling repair that took four years, returning the hall to use in 2016. Seismic dampening was built into the columns during reassembly, an intervention rarely permitted on designated architecture.

Dismantling created an opportunity that standing repair never allows. With the components laid out individually, the survey team read the painted surfaces under infrared light. What had been known only as the presence of decoration resolved into a full programme: mandalas, descent-of-Amida scenes, flying celestials, ranks of three thousand Buddhas, and karyobinga, the half-bird half-human singers of the Pure Land. The team then produced colour reconstruction drawings from the readings.

Those drawings now hang in a building beside the hall, and the contrast is the reason to make the trip. The originals have sunk into the dark grain of the timber. The reconstructions are saturated, gold-heavy, almost gaudy. Standing between the two, the assumption that old temples were always brown collapses.

The building's own history is harder to pin down. Temple tradition offers two founding accounts: one placing Prince Shotoku in 617 enshrining Bishamonten here as a guardian of national peace and lasting fortune, from which the name Chofukuji is said to derive, and another crediting the monk Gyoki with an eighth-century foundation at Emperor Shomu's wish. Neither is documented. For the revival that produced this hall, secondary sources variously name the Saidaiji reformer Eison acting through his disciples in 1255 or 1262, or a monk called Jissen Risshi. The Agency for Cultural Affairs dates the standing building to 1275 to 1332, later than any of those revival dates, so the surviving hall may postdate the revival it is usually credited to.

Finding a Temple Almost Nobody Visits

Chofukuji belongs to the Shingon Ritsu school, takes Kinryuzan as its mountain name, and enshrines a seated Amida Buddha of Edo-period manufacture. A local story explains the mountain name: Emperor Shomu, looking west from the Nara capital, is said to have seen a golden dragon rising into the sky and traced it to the pond on these grounds.

The temple is small and has no parish base supporting it. Raising the money for a four-year dismantling repair was, by the account of those close to the temple, a considerable strain. After the completion ceremony the temple began accepting visitors to the newly arranged precinct, and someone from the temple household walks guests through the history, the images, and the reconstruction drawings. Because there is no ticket office and no fixed schedule published, calling ahead is the reliable approach rather than arriving unannounced.

Two things worth knowing before you go. The temple's most celebrated object is not there: the gilt-bronze nosashoto reliquary, a National Treasure of Kamakura metalwork made to hold a wish-fulfilling jewel, is on deposit at the Tokyo National Museum. A lacquered painted shrine cabinet designated by Nara Prefecture is likewise held elsewhere. Second, several Buddhist sculptures inside the hall arrived here during the Meiji anti-Buddhist upheavals, moved for safekeeping from neighbouring temples, so what stands on the altar has a mixed provenance spanning the Heian to Edo periods.

The grounds also hold a belfry and a Kumano Gongen shrine, and the hillside immediately behind the temple carries the remains of Tawaraguchi Castle, a medieval fortification on the eastern slope of Mount Ikoma. Chofukuji is the sixteenth station on the Bosatsu no Tera Meguri pilgrimage circuit and issues a goshuin seal.

Access is by bus. From Ikoma Station on the Kintetsu Nara Line, take the Nara Kotsu Ikomadai loop service and get off at Tawaraguchi Hanna Chuo Byoin; the temple sits on rising ground a short walk away. Ikoma Station itself is about twenty minutes from Nara and roughly the same from Osaka Namba, which makes this one of the more accessible obscure temples in the prefecture.