Fukiji Temple Main Hall

A Temple That Shares a Fence with a Shrine

Fukiji Main Hall (富貴寺本堂, Fukiji Hondō) is the main hall of a Buddhist temple in Hoda, Kawanishi Town, Shiki District, Nara Prefecture, dated to 1388, and designated an Important Cultural Property of Japan on 20 March 1954.

Before anything else, a point of confusion to clear up. There is a second, better-known Fukiji in Ōita Prefecture, whose Great Hall is a National Treasure and the oldest wooden building in Kyūshū. The two temples write their names with the same characters and have nothing else in common. This article concerns the Nara one, in the flat farmland of the western Nara Basin.

Fukiji shares a precinct boundary with Mutsugata Shrine (六県神社, also written 六縣神社), and the relationship is the older of the two facts about this place. The temple functioned as the shrine's jingūji, the Buddhist establishment attached to a Shintō shrine that housed the shrine deity's Buddhist counterpart. Locally it was called Miyadera, the shrine-temple. Walk the ground today and you find a small hall of stone Jizō figures, then the main hall, then the shrine's worship hall, all in a line. The separation of Buddhism and Shintō ordered in the early Meiji period pulled most such pairings apart. Here the fence line still runs where it always did.

Temple tradition credits the founding to Dōsen (道詮), a monk of the Sanron school active in the Jōgan era (859 to 877). Dōsen is not a minor figure: he restored the Yumedono at Hōryū-ji and worked to revive scholarship there, and a seated portrait of him at Hōryū-ji is a National Treasure. Fukiji today belongs to the Shingon Buzan-ha and is administered as a branch temple of Tsubosaka-dera. No priest lives on site.

The shrine next door enshrines six deities named for the six ancient agata districts of Yamato: Takechi, Katsuragi, Tōchi, Shiki, Yamanobe and Sofu.

Two Building Dates, Copied Down in 1679

No document survives that records when this hall went up. What survives is a note somebody wrote on a pillar.

On a pillar of the inner sanctuary, an ink inscription made in 1679 states that the first hall on this spot was built in 1178, and that the hall was rebuilt in 1388. Nara Prefecture's cultural resource database treats the later date as reliable, since the architectural detailing agrees with it. The earlier date received unexpected support during repair work, when excavation turned up a podium that appears to belong to the twelfth-century phase.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs records the year of construction as Shitoku 5, converting to 1388. Readers who check other sources will find the same year written as Genchū 5, which needs a word of explanation rather than correction. Japan in 1388 had two rival imperial courts using different era names. In the Northern Court the Shitoku era had already given way to Kakei in 1387, making 1388 Kakei 2; in the Southern Court the year was Genchū 5. The inscription's "Shitoku 5" carries on an era name that had lapsed the year before, which happened routinely in provincial records when news of a change travelled slowly. All three labels point to the same calendar year.

The registered form is a hall of five bays by four, single-storeyed, with a hipped roof, a one-bay step canopy at the front, and a roof of formal round-and-flat tiles. One ridge tablet is designated with the building as an attached item. That combination, a hipped roof over a five-by-four plan with heavy tiling, gives the building a low, broad silhouette that reads more like a late fourteenth-century rural main hall than anything courtly.

It came close to being lost. Kawanishi Town's own account describes the hall as having fallen into serious dilapidation until a full dismantling repair was carried out across 1964 and 1965, which the town says transformed it completely. Buildings designated in 1954 did not always survive the following decade in usable condition, and this one owes its present state to that campaign.

The Flaked Wall Behind the Buddha

Three figures occupy the altar, and all three are worth the trip on their own account.

The principal image is a seated wooden Shaka Nyorai, designated an Important Cultural Property in April 1919. It measures 84.5 centimetres, is built up in the yosegi joined-block technique from cypress, with carved eyes and a surface of lacquer and gold leaf. Its lotus pedestal and halo are later additions and survive incompletely. Kawanishi Town places the carving in the very last phase of late Heian wayō sculpture and suggests it dates from around 1178, which would make the image contemporary with the hall's predecessor rather than with the hall standing over it. The Buddha, in other words, is roughly two centuries older than its own roof.

Flanking it are two standing wooden Jizō Bosatsu. The one on the right as you face the altar, 96.3 centimetres, cypress, joined-block, carved eyes, is also an Important Cultural Property designated on the same day in 1919, and Kawanishi Town judges it the work of the same period and essentially the same hand as the Shaka. The other Jizō carries the lesser status of Registered Important Art Object.

Behind the altar is the raigō wall, and its painting is in poor condition. Pigment clings only to the upper boards. Before the repair, some boards had been reinstalled upside down, which tells you something about how long the hall went without competent attention. Enough of the composition can still be read: five seated Buddha-form figures on the right; on the left Fudō Myōō at the centre with flame-haloed wisdom kings above, below and to either side; Fugen on an elephant at the right edge, and at the left edge what appears to be Monju on a lion.

Practical matters. The temple has no resident priest, and Nara Prefecture notes that a group of local residents known as the Gonin-shū carries the burden of looking after it and running its observances. The grounds can be walked, but the interior is not open on a fixed schedule, and anyone hoping to see the images and the wall painting should contact Kawanishi Town's Board of Education in advance rather than turning up and expecting a door to open.

The nearest station is Yuzaki on the Kintetsu Kashihara Line, roughly three kilometres to the east. The walk is pleasant and passes several things worth a stop: Omozuka, associated with the origins of the Kanze school of Noh; Itoi Shrine; the two-hundred-metre keyhole tomb of Shimanoyama Kofun; and Himekuwa Shrine.

If your timing is flexible, aim for 11 February. On that evening the shrine next door stages Kodeki Onda, a rice-planting rite designated a Nara Prefecture cultural property in 2006 and held in the shrine's worship hall. Village elders sit along the north side while the sequence runs through inspecting the water, driving the ox, spreading fertiliser, breaking clods, planting, and gathering shellfish, followed by a comic childbirth scene in which a man in the year of his calamity plays a pregnant wife carrying lunch to her husband. The drum concealed under his robe is the baby.