Eigen Ji Temple Founding Ceremony Text Written in Ink and

The Eigen-ji Founder's Elegy: A Funeral Address in Ink, 1367

On the second day of the ninth month of 1367, the monks of a young Zen temple in the mountains of Ōmi gathered to mourn. Their founder, the priest Jakushitsu Genkō, had died the day before at the age of 78. The text they read aloud over his body still exists, brushed in black ink on paper and held by the temple he built. It is known today as the Eigen-ji Founder's Elegy, dated the second day of the ninth month of Jōji 6, which corresponds to the year 1367.

A document of this kind is called a saimon: a ritual address composed for a memorial rite and read aloud to the spirit of the dead. This one belongs to a small cluster of papers that the temple preserved through the centuries, each tied to the days surrounding Jakushitsu's death. His death verse carries the date of the first of the month, the day he died. The elegy follows on the second. A further address survives from the eighth, the day of the first seven-day memorial observance in Zen custom. Read in sequence, the papers trace the temple's grief almost hour by hour.

The single scroll is registered as an Important Cultural Property in the category of ancient documents, held at Eigen-ji in what is now Higashiōmi City, Shiga Prefecture.

The Founder Behind the Words

Jakushitsu Genkō was born in 1290 in Mimasaka, a province that lies within present-day Okayama Prefecture. He entered religious life young, trained at temples in Kyoto and Kamakura, and in 1320 sailed to Yuan-dynasty China. There he studied under the reclusive master Zhongfeng Mingben on Mount Tianmu, who gave him the name Jakushitsu and shaped the kind of Zen he would practice for the rest of his life: solitary, indifferent to rank, lived in quiet mountain places rather than great urban monasteries.

He returned to Japan in 1326 and spent some 35 years wandering the western provinces, declining most invitations to settle. The court and the Muromachi shogunate repeatedly asked him to take charge of leading temples, including Tenryū-ji in Kyoto and Kenchō-ji in Kamakura. He refused every time. Only late in life, in 1361, did he accept the request of Sasaki Ujiyori, military governor of Ōmi, who admired his reputation and gave him a scenic gorge along the Echi River. There Jakushitsu founded Eigen-ji and, by tradition, lived out his years as a plain monk in black robes.

His end became one of the more memorable scenes in medieval Zen biography. Having written his final admonitions to his disciples and a closing death verse, he is said to have thrown down his brush and died. He had instructed that his community disband and that the temple buildings pass to the local villagers. The elegy was composed and read in the immediate aftermath of that scene.

Why the Elegy Matters

The document was designated an Important Cultural Property on 6 May 1936. Its value rests on more than fine brushwork. It is a contemporary written record, set down within a day of the event it describes, of the death of a founder whose teaching line still continues. Eigen-ji is the head temple of the Eigenji branch of Rinzai Zen, with well over a hundred affiliated temples across Japan, and this paper sits at the very root of that history.

Medieval Japanese temples rarely kept such complete sets of mortuary papers. The survival here of the death verse, the funeral elegy, the seventh-day address, and later memorial texts at the thirteenth and thirty-third anniversaries lets historians study how a Zen community marked the loss of its founder and built his memory across decades. The elegy is the emotional center of that group, the words spoken while the loss was still raw.

The brushwork itself carries weight too. Jakushitsu was admired in his own time as a poet and calligrapher, and the documents connected to him are studied as examples of fourteenth-century Zen writing. The elegy is read alongside them as part of that broader record of how ink, faith, and mourning met on a single sheet of paper.

Visiting Eigen-ji

The elegy is a fragile paper document and is not kept on permanent display. It appears only in occasional special exhibitions, such as the gatherings of temple treasures mounted around major memorial anniversaries. A traveler should not expect to see the scroll itself on an ordinary visit. What rewards the journey is the place that produced it.

Eigen-ji stands on a wooded slope above the Echi River, reached by a stone stairway lined with sixteen carved rakan, the disciples of the Buddha rendered in weathered stone. The founder's hall, or kaizandō, holds a seated clay statue of Jakushitsu that is itself an Important Cultural Property, a rare medieval portrait sculpture shown on special viewings. A maple said to have been planted by the founder still turns deep red each autumn near the gate.

Autumn is when the temple draws its largest crowds. From early November into early December, the maples along the approach and around the main buildings color the whole hillside, and the grounds count among the finest places for foliage in Shiga. During this season the temple extends its hours and lights the maples after dark. The founder's memorial service is held each year on the first of October, the date closest to Jakushitsu's death.

Around the Temple

Eigen-ji sits in the Kotō region east of Lake Biwa, within easy reach of three other celebrated foliage temples known together as the Kotō Sanzan: Hyakusai-ji, Kongōrin-ji, and Saimyō-ji. A day combining Eigen-ji with one or two of these makes a strong autumn itinerary. The nearby Eigenji Dam and the upper Echi River valley add quiet river scenery for those with extra time. The tomb of Ii Naooki, a lord of the Hikone domain, lies near the temple gate and points to the later patronage that helped Eigen-ji recover after its medieval decline.