Wooden Standing Statue of Yakushi Nyorai

The Heian Buddha That Gave Teikan-en Its Name

In the deep-snow hills of southern Niigata, a single wooden statue of the Medicine Buddha has done something almost no Buddhist image can claim: it named a garden. The figure is a standing Yakushi Nyorai, the healing Buddha known in Sanskrit as Bhaishajyaguru, and it is kept in the Teikando, the central hall of Teikan-en in the Takayanagi district of Kashiwazaki City. In 1843 the Confucian scholar Aizawa Nanjo chose the name Teikan for this hall and wrote an 808-character account of it. The garden that had grown up around the hall took the same name, and carries it still.

The statue belongs to the Heian period (794–1185), the long age when Japanese sculptors turned away from clay and dry lacquer and went back to carving Buddhas from wood. The national record describes it in a single line: one figure, carved in wood, of the Heian age. This is not a temple icon shown to crowds. It is a treasure held quietly by the family whose ancestors raised the hall around it.

Who Yakushi Nyorai Is

Yakushi is the Buddha of medicine and healing. His full title, Yakushi Ruriko Nyorai, names him the master of healing whose light has the color of lapis lazuli, and his realm is the Pure Land of Lapis Lazuli in the east. Where Amida promises rescue in the life to come, Yakushi was prayed to for help in this one: recovery from sickness, relief from pain, a few more years. That practical hope made him one of the most widely worshipped Buddhas in Japan from the Nara period onward.

Most images of him are easy to read. The left hand cradles a small medicine jar; the right is raised with the palm turned outward, the gesture that tells the worshipper not to be afraid. For a visitor from outside Japan, this pairing of jar and open palm is the visual shorthand for a Buddha who cares about the body as much as the soul. The Teikan-en figure stands within that long tradition of Yakushi worship.

Why It Is an Important Cultural Property

The statue was designated in May 1939. At that moment it was registered as a National Treasure under the prewar National Treasures Preservation Law. When Japan rebuilt its heritage system with the Cultural Properties Protection Law of 1950, the old national treasures were reclassified, and the Yakushi of Teikan-en became an Important Cultural Property, the rank it holds today. Its designation number is 00199.

It was not honored alone. On that same day in 1939, two works of calligraphy from the same collection were designated together: ink writings by the Chinese emigre monk Yishan Yining and by the Zen master Jakushitsu Genko. A painting of plum in snow joined the list in 1956. Few country houses in Japan hold such a cluster of nationally recognized art, and the Yakushi is its eldest member by several centuries.

Part of what gives the statue its weight is simply where it survived. Fine Heian sculpture is usually a story told through Kyoto and Nara. To find a carved Buddha of this age on the snowy Japan Sea coast, kept by one family across generations, says a good deal about how far the capital's Buddhist culture reached and how firmly it could settle into provincial soil.

What You Actually See When You Visit

Most people who make the trip to Teikan-en come for the moss. Garden specialists have ranked it among the three finest moss gardens in the country, and through the damp months the ground glows in a hundred greens. The design follows an old principle the family put as "stone the host, trees the guest." Weathered rocks, many of them the reddish jade quarried on Sado Island, set the composition; the planting plays a supporting part. The pond at the center is shaped like the character for heart.

You take all of this in from the veranda and corridors of the Teikando, because the moss is far too fragile to walk among. The restriction turns out to be a gift. Sitting on the wooden edge of the hall, with the garden framed before you like a long handscroll, is the whole point of the visit.

The hall rewards slow attention on its own. Gold-ground paintings on its sliding doors are attributed to the Kano school; a set of panels came from the Kyoto painter Ganku and his pupils; a hawk by Kikuchi Yosai looks down from the transom. In the alcove hangs Aizawa Nanjo's long account of the name Teikan. Somewhere within this building, the Heian Yakushi that started everything keeps its quiet place at the center.

The garden opens only for the warmer half of the year. Early summer brings the freshest green, the maples turn from late October, and after any rain the moss reaches its deepest color. Then the Echigo snow closes the road, and the garden sleeps until spring.

Around Teikan-en

The Takayanagi hills reward an unhurried day. About three and a half kilometers from the garden lies Ogishima, one of the very few ring-shaped thatched hamlets left in Japan, where steep-roofed farmhouses stand in a circle around their paddies. The neighboring village of Kadoide still keeps both a row of thatched houses and a living papermaking craft, Echigo Kadoide washi.

For a soak and a meal, Takayanagi Jonnobi Mura has a reddish, mineral-rich hot spring and country lodging. Families often pair the area with the Niigata Prefectural Children's Nature Kingdom nearby. Drivers passing through can stop at the Nashinokida rice terraces, counted among Japan's hundred best.

Down on the coast, Kashiwazaki proper offers sea-cliff scenery, and in the Onatani area you can catch Ayako-mai, a folk dance inscribed by UNESCO. For travelers spending a night in the region, it sits comfortably alongside a morning in the garden.