Sengokuji Temple Founder's Hall

A Roof Built Over a Grave

Senpukuji Kaisandō (泉福寺開山堂, also written Senpuku-ji Kaisan-dō) is the founder's hall of the Soto Zen temple Senpukuji in the Yokote district of Kunisaki City, Oita Prefecture, rebuilt in 1636 and designated an Important Cultural Property of Japan on 23 January 1933.

Its purpose is unusually literal. Beneath the altar at the rear of the hall stands a stone muhōtō, the egg-shaped, unjointed grave marker reserved for Zen abbots, holding the remains of Muchaku Myōyū (無著妙融, 1333-1393, also read Mujaku Myōyū), the monk who opened this monastery. The building exists to shelter that stone. In Japanese terms it is a fukudō, a covering hall, and everything about its proportions follows from the object at its centre.

Muchaku came here in 1375 at the invitation of Tawara Ujitaka (田原氏能) of the Ōtomo clan, who is said to have acted on his mother's wish. He died in 1393, and a hall over his grave was raised the following year, in 1394. That first structure eventually fell into serious disrepair. The version standing today was put up in 1636, smaller than its predecessor and incorporating salvaged timber from it, so the fabric a visitor sees carries material from two separate campaigns.

The hall also outlasted the worst moment in the temple's history. In 1581 Ōtomo Sōrin, the Christian convert who ruled Bungo, put Senpukuji to the torch. The lecture hall and most of the compound burned. The Kaisandō and the Butsuden came through. Hosokawa Tadaoki, then lord of Nakatsu, funded the rebuilding from 1605, and the temple went on to serve as the head monastery of the Soto school in Kyushu through the Edo period.

Zen Grammar at Miniature Scale

Measured across its three-bay front, the Kaisandō is 4.01 metres wide. Counting the lean-to at the back, the depth reaches 4.87 metres. That is smaller than many living rooms, and yet nothing has been simplified.

The roof is gabled, entered from the gable end, and covered in kokerabuki, thin overlapping wooden shingles. Round columns rise from wooden base blocks and taper at both ends in the manner called chimaki. A head tie and a flat bearing plate run around the top of the columns, and above them projecting bracket complexes are set in a continuous row across each bay rather than only over the columns. The eaves are double, with closely spaced rafters. In the gable, a vase-shaped strut sits between two tiers of curved beams. The walls, both gable and flank, are board. The central bay of the front carries a panelled sangarado door that swings outward, and the floor inside is planked.

One detail is worth watching for from below. The rafters are each given a slight twist so that, collectively, they lift the eave line into its upward curve. It is a laborious way to achieve that sweep, and it is the kind of thing carpenters trained in continental Zen practice did as a matter of course.

The 1636 date is not an estimate. When the hall was taken apart for repair in 1960, an ink inscription from the Kan'ei era came to light in the frame, confirming what the temple had long held. The grave marker itself, designated as an accessory to the building, is octagonal in its base, shaft and mid-section, a refinement above the plain forms usually seen.

Records disagree slightly on the designation date, and the discrepancy is easily explained. The Agency for Cultural Affairs database gives 23 January 1933. Kunisaki City's own inventory gives 29 August 1950, the day the Cultural Properties Protection Law took effect and properties registered under the earlier National Treasures Preservation Law were carried over into the new Important Cultural Property category. The hall's designation number, 00911, sits far below the Butsuden's 02405, a reminder that it entered the national register nearly seventy years earlier than its larger neighbour.

Seeing It Today

Visitors should know before arriving that the Kaisandō stands inside a reinforced concrete shelter built to protect it. The hall is not weathering in the open, and photographs that show a small shingled roof against the trees do not reflect what you meet on site. Whatever is lost in atmosphere is repaid in survival: a four-metre wooden building of this age would not have lasted otherwise. The tiled roof of that shelter was itself completely re-laid during the temple-wide restoration campaign of the 2000s, which also saw the Butsuden fully dismantled and rebuilt and the Shōdō taken apart and reassembled.

The Shōdō is the building to look at next. Dated 1497 and designated by the city, it stands immediately in front of the Kaisandō with its rear joined to it, and was raised as the place from which the founder's hall is venerated. Its roof is hipped-and-gabled with a gable entrance, switching to a plain gable at the back; a fire-hook window sits above a large curved beam; a figure of Kannon is enshrined inside. The floor is boarded now, though the interior was originally packed earth and the front fittings once stood further back.

A portrait sculpture of the founder also survives, designated by Oita Prefecture in 2014. Carved from cypress in joined-block technique with inlaid crystal eyes, it stands 101.6 centimetres in overall height and is thought to date from the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century, close to the period when the first Kaisandō went up. The face is gaunt, the cheekbones high, the gaze fixed at a distance. The present colouring, with layers of black lacquer, was applied in the Edo period. Senpukuji's copy of the Shōbōgenzō Shō, thirty-one volumes designated by the prefecture, is said to have been kept in the founder's hall and never taken outside it.

Practical matters are simple. There is no set admission charge; an offering is customary. Senpukuji is served by one resident priest, so a funeral or memorial service can mean the temple office is unstaffed, and calling ahead is worth the trouble (0978-72-2035, with 090-2514-6864 listed by the local tourism association). About twenty parking spaces are available and coaches can be accommodated. Oita Airport lies within the same city, roughly twenty-five minutes away by car, though buses through this part of the peninsula are infrequent enough that a car or taxi is the sensible choice. Zazen sittings of about thirty minutes and sutra copying of about an hour can be booked in advance at 1,000 yen each. Photography rules are not published, so ask before shooting near the hall. Senpukuji is the twenty-third site on the Usa Jingū Rokugō Manzan pilgrimage circuit, where nearly every other temple belongs to the Tendai school, and the contrast in atmosphere is part of what makes the stop worthwhile.