Thirteen-Story Pagoda of Hosenji Temple

Hōsen-ji Thirteen-Story Stone Pagoda

A granite pagoda of thirteen tiers rises in the precinct of Hōsen-ji, a small Shingon temple in the Kusachi district of Kyotanabe, in southern Kyoto Prefecture. Cut into the stone of its base is a line of characters recording the day the monument was raised: the twenty-sixth day of the eleventh month of Kōan 1, a year that corresponds to 1278. Few medieval stone pagodas in Japan can be dated so precisely, and fewer still carry the name of the craftsman who made them.

The pagoda belongs to a temple whose own beginnings went unrecorded. Local tradition holds that the principal image, an Eleven-Headed Kannon, was found in a thicket of grass, and that the surrounding settlement took its name, Kusachi, from that event. A second story attaches to the temple's name. During a drought in the Tenchō era (824–834), prayers offered to the same image are said to have drawn a clear spring up out of the ground, and the temple came to be called Hōsen-ji, the Temple of the Dharma Spring. Farmers here long revered the Kannon as a guardian of the harvest and a deity to petition for rain.

Why the pagoda matters

Japan's modern system for protecting cultural property reached this monument early. It was designated an Important Cultural Property on 24 May 1916, in the fifth year of the Taishō era, while the national register of architectural monuments was still being assembled. The official record classes it as a pre-modern stone structure of the late Kamakura period and lists it as a single unit.

What sets the pagoda apart is the inscription on its base. Among the characters is the title daiku, master builder, followed by a name read as I Sueyuki. He belonged to a workshop of stonemasons descended from I Yukisue, a craftsman who had come to Japan from Song-dynasty China in the previous century. That family carried continental techniques of stone carving into the Yamashiro and Yamato regions, and their hand shaped the look of stone pagodas across the area for several generations. A dated and signed piece by a member of this lineage gives historians a fixed point against which other, undated works can be measured.

The carving itself shows the confidence of Kamakura-period stonework. Each of the thirteen roof stones was cut from a single block of granite and stacked above the body of the lowest tier. The eaves are thick and turn upward with a firm, deliberate curve, far from the thinner, flatter profiles favored in later centuries.

What to look for

Begin at the bottom. The body stone of the first tier carries, on each of its four faces, a seated Buddha worked in half-relief, one image for each of the cardinal directions. These are the Buddhas of the four quarters, a scheme common to such pagodas, and the shallow modeling lets the figures gather shadow in the raking light of early morning and late afternoon.

Step back, and the proportions come clear. The structure climbs to roughly six meters, narrowing as it goes, so that the thirteen tiers read as a single tapering line against the sky. Granite weathers slowly. Seven centuries in the open have left the surface a lichen-flecked grey.

The pagoda does not stand alone. Hōsen-ji also keeps a dry-landscape garden restored in the manner of the Muromachi period and a stone marker known as the Sanbō-kōjin tama-ishi-tō. The main hall has had a harder time of it: it burned in the fighting of 1559, was rebuilt in 1699, and was put up once more in 1959. The building a visitor sees today is therefore modern, even though the pagoda beside it is medieval.

Getting there and nearby sights

Hōsen-ji sits east of the Kizu River, in a quiet area of houses and farmland. The closest railway stations are JR Miyamaki and the adjacent Kintetsu Miyamaki, from which the temple is a modest walk or a short taxi ride. Trains run about twice an hour, so it helps to check the timetable before setting out. This is a working temple rather than a managed tourist site, so visitors should keep to the precinct, avoid disturbing any service in progress, and treat the grounds with the quiet they are due.

The wider Kyotanabe area rewards a longer day. Kannon-ji, a short distance away, holds a National Treasure standing statue of the Eleven-Headed Kannon. Shūon-an, better known as Ikkyū-ji after the celebrated medieval monk Ikkyū who spent his last years there, lies to the north and ranks among the district's principal temples. For those drawn to earlier history, the Tsuzuki tumulus group, a National Historic Site, preserves burial mounds from the centuries before Buddhism reached this part of Japan.