Enkoji Temple Nine-Storied Pagoda

A Granite Tower Cut in the 1250s

Enkoji Kujūnotō (圓光寺九重塔, also written 円光寺九重塔), the stone nine storey pagoda standing in the precinct of Enkoji temple in Kunobe, Yasu City, Shiga Prefecture, was carved in the Kōgen era of the early Kamakura period, around 1256 to 1257, and designated an Important Cultural Property of Japan on 23 March 1961.

The dating rests on the stone itself. An inscription cut into the tower gives the era name Kōgen, though the character recording the year within that era can no longer be read. Kōgen lasted barely two years, which narrows the range tightly. Dated stone pagodas of the thirteenth century are scarce enough that this single worn graph does real work for anyone trying to build a chronology of medieval stonecarving in Ōmi, the old province covering present day Shiga.

The material is granite, quarried locally. The tower now stands close to 3.94 metres, and it is not complete.

Reading What Is Missing

Two absences shape how specialists see this pagoda.

The first is the sōrin, the metal or stone finial that should crown a tower of this type, a stacked sequence of rings and a jewel that carries much of the symbolic weight of the form. It is gone. What sits on top instead is a roof stone taken from a hōtō, a different and smaller class of stone monument, fitted in at some later date as a replacement. Look at the ninth tier against the eight below it and the mismatch in profile and proportion becomes visible.

The second absence is harder to see because it involves stones that are simply no longer there. Specialists in Japanese stone monuments generally hold that the tower originally rose to thirteen storeys rather than nine, and that four tiers were lost, probably in the same disruption that damaged the temple. Thirteen storeys was a standard, prestigious format. Nine is the count the tower has carried through its modern history and the count under which it is designated, so the name records a diminished state rather than an original design.

Understanding this changes the impression the tower makes. At close to four metres it already dominates the forecourt. Restore the missing tiers and the finial in your mind and the original would have stood substantially taller, a landmark visible across the flat farmland north of the Yasu river well before the modern town grew around it.

The Four Buddhas on the First Tier

The carving concentrated in the lowest storey repays close attention. Each of the four faces of the first tier body stone has a shallow recess cut into it, shaped like an upright boat or almond, a form Japanese art historians call funagata. Within these recesses appear the four Buddhas of the Diamond Realm, the Kongōkai shibutsu, who in esoteric Buddhist cosmology surround Dainichi Nyorai at the cardinal points.

Three of the four are rendered as figures, seated and frontal, with the shallow modelling and heavy proportions that mark thirteenth century work in hard stone. The fourth face carries no figure at all. In its place is a single Sanskrit seed syllable, written in the Siddham script, read Tāraku and standing for Hōshō Nyorai, the Buddha of the southern quarter. Mixing carved figures and a seed syllable on one monument is not a mistake or a later repair; it is an accepted convention, and the archaic cast of the three figures is one of the reasons the tower is placed early rather than late in the Kamakura sequence.

The base carries a further quirk. Kōzama, the recessed panel with an ogee outline that appears on the plinths of Buddhist furniture and stonework, has been cut into only two of the four faces rather than all four. One of those two is thought to be a later addition, cut by a different hand at a different time. Circle the base slowly and compare the two panels; the difference in the curve of the outline is the kind of detail that repays a second look.

Where It Stands, and How to See It

The pagoda is the first thing you meet inside the gate. It rises from the forecourt, with the temple main hall set back behind it across a yard planted with pines and enclosed by earthen walls. That main hall, built in 1257 and carrying an ink inscription giving its year, is itself an Important Cultural Property, so the two designated structures here are near contemporaries: a hall of wood and a tower of granite raised within a year or two of each other, one dated by writing on a ridgepole, the other by an era name cut into stone.

Getting there takes little effort. JR Yasu Station on the Biwako Line is about thirteen minutes on foot; the Ōmi Railway bus on the Kibe loop reaches the Kunobe stop in three minutes, and the temple stands just west of the Kunobe intersection. Kyoto is around fifty minutes away by ordinary train.

The grounds are open, entry is free, and the pagoda stands in the open air where it can be walked around and photographed without restriction. Part of the precinct doubles as a neighbourhood park. There is no barrier and no ticket; the only thing worth arranging in advance is access to the interior of the main hall, which is handled through the temple rather than as a scheduled opening.

Morning light from the east catches the first tier carvings at a low angle and brings out the shallow relief, which flattens badly under the overhead sun of early afternoon.