Enryakuji Temple Great Lecture Hall (formerly the Honjido

A Lecture Hall That Began as a Shrine Building

The Great Lecture Hall, or Daikōdō, that visitors meet in the Tōdō precinct of Enryaku-ji was neither built as a lecture hall nor first raised on Mount Hiei. It went up in 1634 at the foot of the mountain, in the temple town of Sakamoto, as the honjidō of a Tōshōgū shrine that venerated Tokugawa Ieyasu. The hall reached the summit only in 1963, when it was dismantled, carried up the slope, and reassembled to fill a gap left by fire.

A honjidō is worth pausing on, because the term explains why a Shinto shrine owned a Buddhist hall in the first place. Medieval Japanese religion held that local kami were earthly appearances of Buddhas and bodhisattvas, and a honjidō enshrined that underlying Buddhist form. The Sakamoto shrine deified Ieyasu as the avatar Tōshō Daigongen, whose Buddhist counterpart was Yakushi, the healing Buddha. The priest Tenkai, the Tendai cleric who shaped the cult of the deified shogun, founded the shrine in 1623 and oversaw its rebuilding in 1634, the year the hall in question was completed.

When the government ordered the separation of Shinto and Buddhism in the early Meiji period, the shrine was recast as the Hiyoshi Tōshōgū and the Buddhist hall was renamed the Sanbutsudō and handed to Enryaku-ji. It might have remained a quiet secondary building. Then in 1956 an arson fire destroyed the great Edo-period Daikōdō standing on the mountaintop, and in 1963 the temple moved the Sanbutsudō up to the cleared site and gave it the lecture hall's name and role.

Why the Building Was Designated

The hall was listed as a national Important Cultural Property on 3 June 1987. Its value rests on two things: the quality of its early Edo carpentry, and its rarity as a surviving Tōshōgū honjidō, since most such Buddhist halls were torn down or dispersed during the anti-Buddhist campaigns of the 1870s.

Read the structure closely and a mixed grammar emerges. The frame is built mainly in the wayō manner, the older Japanese idiom: horizontal nageshi tie-beams run around the walls, and lattice shutters called shitomido open the lower bays. Look up at the gable ends, though, and the decoration switches register, with a double rainbow-beam carrying a bulbous daikenzuka strut, and a few panelled sankarado doors borrow from the zenshūyō, the Zen-temple style imported from China. A carpenter of 1634 was working with both vocabularies at once.

The plan is modest by the standards of the hall it replaced. It measures seven bays across the front and six along the side, roughly 22.7 metres by 18 metres, a single storey under a hip-and-gable roof now sheathed in copper. A three-bay kōhai, the projecting prayer canopy, shelters the entrance. The old mountaintop Daikōdō that Tokugawa Iemitsu had rebuilt was a far larger, Zen-style structure close to 33 metres wide; the replacement is plainer, and that plainness is part of what the designation recognises.

What to Notice Inside and Out

The interior is fully floored, with the front three bays forming the outer worship space and the area behind it the inner sanctuary. At the centre sits the principal image, a Dainichi Nyorai of the Womb-realm form, attended by an Eleven-headed Kannon and a figure of Miroku, the future Buddha.

The hall's real surprise is the company kept along its walls. Carved and painted around the main altar are Emperor Kanmu, who backed Saichō's founding of the temple; Prince Shōtoku; the Chinese master Zhiyi, whose teaching gave Tendai its name; Saichō himself; and a row of monks who trained on this mountain before leaving to start schools of their own. Among them are Hōnen and Shinran of the Pure Land traditions, Eisai and Dōgen who brought Zen practice from China, Nichiren, and Ippen. Mount Hiei sent so many founders into the wider world that it earned a reputation as the seedbed of Japanese Buddhism, and this single room gathers their likenesses in one place.

The Daikōdō has always been a hall for argument rather than quiet prayer. It is the stage for the doctrinal debates by which Tendai monks are examined, including the Hokke Daie, the formal disputation a monk must pass to be recognised as fully ordained. Standing inside, it helps to picture the floor filled not with sightseers but with robed examinees defending points of scripture.

The Tōdō Precinct and Getting There

The Daikōdō sits in the Tōdō, the eastern and oldest of Enryaku-ji's three precincts, a short walk from the bus centre and just past the Kokuhōden, the temple's treasure museum. A few minutes downhill stands the Konpon Chūdō, the national-treasure main hall where a lamp is said to have burned without going out since Saichō lit it. Enryaku-ji as a whole is inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list as one of the Historic Monuments of Ancient Kyoto.

Most visitors reach the summit by the Sakamoto Cable, the funicular that climbs from Sakamoto on the lake side, or by the Eizan Cable and ropeway from the Kyoto side; buses and the toll road also serve the mountain. A single admission ticket covers the Tōdō, Saitō, and Yokawa precincts, so it is worth allowing half a day to walk between them through the cedar forest.