Dharma on Paper and Ink on the 13th Anniversary of the

A Memorial Sermon for Eigenji's Founder

On the first day of the ninth month in 1379, twelve years to the day after the death of the priest who had founded Eigenji, a Zen discourse was spoken before his memorial altar. The words of that discourse survive on two hanging scrolls of ink on paper, still held at the temple in the wooded hills of Higashiomi, in eastern Shiga. The Agency for Cultural Affairs lists the piece under its full name: the Dharma talk for the thirteenth-anniversary memorial of the founder of Eigenji, dated the first day of the ninth month, Koryaku 1.

A Dharma talk, or hogo, is a Zen teacher's spoken instruction, often delivered on a formal occasion and later written down. By the inclusive way deaths are counted in East Asian Buddhism, the thirteenth memorial falls in the twelfth year after a person dies, the death year itself counting as the first. The choice of the ninth month's first day was no coincidence. That was the date the founder had died, and the community gathered each year to mark it.

The founder was Jakushitsu Genko (1290–1367), a Rinzai Zen monk born in Mimasaka, in what is now Maniwa, Okayama Prefecture. He sailed to Yuan China in 1320 and studied under Zhongfeng Mingben on Mount Tianmu, who gave him the religious name Jakushitsu. Back in Japan he spent decades moving from one mountain retreat to another, declining the fame that came his way. He was past seventy when the provincial governor Sasaki Ujiyori persuaded him to found a temple in the Echi River valley in 1361. He turned down later summonses to lead the great monasteries of Tenryu-ji in Kyoto and Kencho-ji in Kamakura, and lived out his life in a plain black robe.

Why the Scrolls Are Designated

Japan recognizes cultural property in tiers. An Important Cultural Property sits one step below the National Treasure rank and is selected by the national government for its historical or artistic worth. These two scrolls were named an Important Cultural Property on 6 May 1936, classed as komonjo, old documents, rather than as a work of painting or sculpture.

Their value is partly documentary. The sermon belongs to a set of papers at Eigenji that record the rites held for the founder across more than thirty years, from the funeral address and the seventh-day eulogy written in the year of his death in 1367, through this thirteenth-anniversary talk of 1379, to a discourse and incense address for the thirty-third memorial in 1399. Read together, the papers show a fledgling temple keeping faith with the memory of the man who started it, decade after decade.

The designation record leaves the dimensions and the name of the writer blank, so the hand that brushed the text is not formally identified. After Jakushitsu died, four senior disciples, Miten, Shorei, Reichu and Ekkei, held the temple together, and the memorial discourses came from that circle of successors rather than from the founder himself. The piece commemorates Jakushitsu; it is not in his own brush.

What to Look For at Eigenji

The scrolls themselves are fragile paper and are kept in the temple's storehouse, not set out for daily viewing. What a visitor can see is the place that produced them, and the founder they honor. Eigenji is the head temple of its own branch of Rinzai Zen, with well over a hundred affiliated temples across the country. The buildings standing today date from the Edo period, the older halls having burned in the wars of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but the setting along the Echi River is the same valley Jakushitsu chose.

Walk up the stone approach and you pass a row of sixteen rakan figures carved into the rock. At the top, the founder's hall, called Daijakuto, holds a seated wooden statue of Jakushitsu that is itself an Important Cultural Property. Near it grows a maple said to have been planted by the founder; the tree living there now is the third in that line.

The yearly memorial that the 1379 sermon once served is still observed. On the first of October, priests from across the branch gather to chant before the founder's image and burn incense in his memory, a living continuation of the rite the scrolls describe.

Around the Temple

Most travelers come to Eigenji in autumn. The valley is one of the finest places in Shiga to see maples turn, with color usually peaking in mid-November, when the temple extends its hours and lights the trees after dark. New green in late April and May draws a quieter crowd. The principal image enshrined in the main hall, a secret Kannon known locally as the Yotsugi Kannon, is associated with prayers for children and family continuity.

The temple sits in the hills east of Lake Biwa. From Yokaichi Station on the Ohmi Railway, a bus reaches the Eigenji stop in about 35 to 40 minutes. By car it is roughly 20 minutes from the Yokaichi interchange on the Meishin Expressway, along National Route 421. Paid parking is available near the Dando bridge, with extra private lots opening in the autumn season. The wider Higashiomi area pairs well with Hyakusai-ji, another temple famed for its foliage, for a day among the eastern hills.