Shuonan

Shūon'an Ikkyū-ji: The Temple Ikkyū Came Home To

At the end of a maple-lined path in Kyotanabe, south of Kyoto, a gate carved with the imperial chrysanthemum stays locked. Behind it lies the grave of Ikkyū Sōjun, the fifteenth-century Zen monk whose riddles and unruly life made him a folk hero across Japan. The grave is administered by the Imperial Household Agency, which recognizes Ikkyū as a son of Emperor Go-Komatsu, so visitors stop at the gate and look through the openwork carving rather than stepping inside.

The temple is formally named Shūon'an, though almost everyone calls it Ikkyū-ji. It belongs to the Daitoku-ji branch of the Rinzai school of Zen. Its origins reach back to the late thirteenth century, when the monk Nanpo Jōmyō, posthumously titled Daiō Kokushi, founded a training hall here called Myōshō-ji after returning from study in China. War in the fourteenth century left the place in ruins.

Ikkyū rebuilt it in 1456, when he was past sixty. He named it Shūon'an, a phrase meaning to repay a debt of gratitude, in honor of the teaching lineage he had inherited. He spent his last years here and died in the temple in 1481 at the age of eighty-eight. Even after he was appointed abbot of the great Daitoku-ji in Kyoto, he is said to have commuted from this quiet country temple rather than move.

Seven Buildings, Two Centuries, One Compound

Seven structures at Shūon'an carry the national designation of Important Cultural Property, and they fall into two distinct groups separated by roughly a hundred and fifty years.

The oldest is the Main Hall, designated in 1911. It is dated to 1506 and is regarded as the earliest surviving example of karayō, the Chinese-derived Zen architectural style, in the Yamashiro and Yamato regions that border present-day Kyoto and Nara. The hall measures three bays by three under a single cypress-bark roof. Look for the paneled doors, the cusped windows, the triple-stepped bracket clusters, and the fan-pattern rafters beneath the eaves, all hallmarks of the style. The outer sanctuary keeps its decorative exposed rafters while the inner sanctuary is finished with a flat coffered ceiling.

The other six buildings went up between 1650 and 1654, paid for by Maeda Toshitsune, the third lord of the wealthy Kaga domain. Passing through decades earlier on his way to the Siege of Osaka, he had been troubled by the temple's decay and resolved to restore it. His reconstruction gave the compound its abbot's hall, kitchen-residence, gabled gate, bell tower, bathhouse, and latrine, each built in the manner of its day and together forming the core of the temple landscape. The bell tower, three bays by two, rises on a flaring skirted base under a tiled hip-and-gable roof.

Two gardens hold the separate national rank of Place of Scenic Beauty. The garden around the abbot's hall, laid out in the early Edo period, is credited to a collaboration among Ishikawa Jōzan, Shōkadō Shōjō, and Sagawada Kiroku. A second, older dry-landscape garden belongs to the Kokyū-an retreat above.

What Rewards a Slow Visit

Inside the abbot's hall sits a wooden image of Ikkyū carved in the year of his death by his disciple Bokusai. By tradition the monk's own hair and beard were set into it, which lends the seated figure an unsettling closeness to the living man. The hall's sliding-door paintings were done by Kanō Tan'yū at the age of forty-nine and take up Chinese subjects, among them the Eight Views of Xiao and Xiang. The panels on view today are high-resolution reproductions; the originals are kept in the treasure hall.

The dry garden on the south side of the abbot's hall sets clipped azalea hedges and raked white sand against the wooded slope that holds Ikkyū's tomb and the Kokyū-an. The east garden arranges upright and reclining stones in a composition said to suggest the sixteen arhats. This is a place to sit on the veranda and let the eye travel slowly.

The approach itself is the reason many people come in late November. Maples arch over a geometric pavement of cut granite, and fallen leaves gather on a floor of green moss. Because the temple lies outside central Kyoto, it stays calmer than the celebrated foliage sites in the city even at the height of the season.

The Kokyū-an retreat in the upper precinct was moved here from the Higashiyama district of Kyoto, and Ikkyū lived in it. Its garden is attributed to Murata Jukō, the monk's disciple and the figure later credited with shaping the spare aesthetic of the tea ceremony, a line that runs through Takeno Jōō to Sen no Rikyū. The retreat is usually closed, with a special opening around February.

Getting There and Nearby

Shūon'an stands in the Takigi district on the eastern side of Kyotanabe. From JR Kyotanabe Station on the Gakkentoshi Line it is about a twenty-minute walk, and roughly twenty-five minutes from Shin-Tanabe Station on the Kintetsu line. A Keihan bus to the Ikkyū-ji-michi stop leaves a five-minute walk. By car the temple is reached from the Tanabe-nishi interchange and has its own parking lot.

A teahouse at the entrance serves zenzai, a warm sweet red-bean soup, along with udon. Allow about an hour for the buildings, the gardens, and the treasure hall, which displays Ikkyū's portrait and surviving examples of his calligraphy. Kyotanabe sits on the rail line between Kyoto and Nara, which makes the temple an easy detour for travelers moving between the two old capitals.