Paperback and Ink Calligraphy of Eigenji Temple Founder

A Dharma Address from the Spring of 1377

In the third lunar month of 1377, ten years after the Zen master Jakushitsu Genkō had died, the monks of Eigen-ji gathered to carry their founder's memory into a hall newly raised in his honor. The formal address spoken at that ceremony was written out in ink on paper, and the sheet has stayed at the temple ever since. Catalogued today as the Dharma Address for the Founder's Entry into the Hall at Sairai-an, it survives as a single hanging scroll and is classified as an old document of the fourteenth century.

Eigen-ji stands in the mountains of Higashiōmi, in eastern Shiga Prefecture, above the right bank of the Echi River. The monastery was founded in 1361, when Sasaki Ujiyori, the provincial governor of Ōmi, gave the scenic valley of Raikei to the eminent monk Jakushitsu Genkō (1290-1367) and invited him, then seventy-one, to open a temple there. By tradition some two thousand monks soon gathered around him, and the wooded slopes once held dozens of sub-temples.

The text itself belongs to a precise moment in monastic life. A hōgo, or Dharma address, is a formal instruction delivered in the public voice of the meditation hall. The "entry into the hall" of its title refers to the rite of installing a founder's portrait and spirit-seat in the patriarch's hall, the building set aside to honor the monk who first opened the temple. This scroll records the words spoken as Jakushitsu passed, in ritual terms, from a remembered teacher into an enshrined patriarch.

A Record of How a Temple Remembered Its Founder

The scroll was designated an Important Cultural Property in May 1936. It does not stand alone. It belongs to a group of documents connected with Jakushitsu's memorial rites, kept together at Eigen-ji: a funeral oration written days after his death in 1367, an address for the first seventh-day memorial, a text for the thirteenth-anniversary service in 1379, and another for the thirty-third anniversary in 1399. Read in sequence, they form an unusually full account of how a Rinzai community marked the passing of its founder and renewed that memory across decades.

The 1377 address sits at a turning point in that sequence. The same year saw the building of the founder's hall, known as the Daijaku-tō, or Hall of Great Tranquility, raised by the monk Ikkei to honor Jakushitsu's reputation for austere virtue. The Dharma address and the hall are two halves of one event: a community giving its founder a permanent place at the heart of the temple he had opened.

There is a second reason the sheet is prized. In Zen culture the ink traces of an eminent monk, called bokuseki, are valued as objects of veneration in their own right, studied for the character and discipline the brush reveals. The Sairai-an address is read both as a historical document and as calligraphy from the formative generation of the Eigen-ji line.

Visiting the Place the Words Were Spoken

Like most medieval manuscripts, the scroll is not kept on regular display, and it appears only occasionally in special exhibitions. What can be visited is the temple itself, and the very building the address was written to inaugurate. The founder's hall stands deep in the precinct, rebuilt more than once after fires swept the mountain. In front of it grows a maple said to descend from one planted by Jakushitsu's own hand; the present tree is reckoned the third in that line.

The approach is part of the experience. From the riverside gate, a stone path climbs past the main gate toward the inner halls, running for much of its length under a canopy of maples. The main hall is roofed not in tile but in reed cut from the shores of Lake Biwa, rethatched every decade or so. In late autumn the whole valley turns, and the walk to the founder's hall has long been counted among the finest foliage scenes in the region. Come in November and the crowds confirm it; come on a quiet morning out of season and the gorge keeps its older, stiller character.

Around Eigen-ji

The temple makes a natural pairing with the three mountain temples of eastern Ōmi, Hyakusai-ji, Kongōrin-ji, and Saimyō-ji, which share the same reputation for autumn color and lie a short drive to the north. The grounds also hold the graves of the Ii lords of Hikone, a designated historic site, and the main worship hall now carries a recently painted dragon on its ceiling. The hidden image of Yotsugi Kannon enshrined here is associated by worshippers with the wish for children.