Wooden Sitting Statue of Chisho Daishi (placed in the

A Portrait Shown One Day a Year

Once every twelve months, on 29 October, the doors of a small cabinet deep inside Onjō-ji swing open, and a seated figure in lacquer and color comes briefly into view. This is the wooden seated statue of Chishō Daishi known as the Naka-son Daishi, a National Treasure carved in the tenth century. For the rest of the year it stays shut away in the Daishidō, the founder's hall at the secluded core of the temple grounds in Ōtsu, Shiga, beside Lake Biwa.

The subject is Enchin (814–891), the monk later given the title Chishō Daishi. He revived Onjō-ji as a Tendai center in the late ninth century and became the figure around whom the Jimon branch of the school took shape. The Agency for Cultural Affairs registers the image under the name "enshrined at the mausoleum" (Gobyō anchi), while the temple and most visitors call it the Naka-son Daishi, after its central place on the altar.

How the Portrait Reached Onjō-ji

Temple tradition holds that two portrait statues of Enchin were made by his disciples not long after his death in 891. This one began its life elsewhere. It first stood at the Senju-in, Enchin's old cloister on nearby Mount Hiei, the headquarters of the Tendai school.

A long quarrel split the Tendai community. Monks based on the mountain at Enryaku-ji formed the Sanmon faction; those loyal to Enchin's lineage became the Jimon faction. In 993 the Jimon side left Mount Hiei and settled at Onjō-ji, carrying this portrait of their teacher with them. The statue's arrival is bound up with the founding of the independent community that still leads the temple.

Its companion on the altar, the Okotsu Daishi, contains Enchin's cremated remains and is reckoned slightly older, closer to the years just after his death. Placed side by side, the two images frame the beginnings of the school.

Reading the Carving

The figure sits 84.3 centimeters tall, worked in cypress and finished in paint. The head and the core of the body were cut from a single block of hinoki. Separate pieces were then joined along each side, from shoulder to elbow, to give the torso fullness, with a horizontal block added across the knees. The method let the sculptor build a rounded, lifelike body from a structurally simple base.

Color does much of the work here. Over a lacquer ground, the skin is painted in flesh tones; the eyebrows are laid in with fine black strokes, the eyes outlined in ink with black pupils ringed in vermilion, and the lips touched red. Even the shadow of a shaved beard is rendered. On the robes, a "distant mountain" pattern of layered ridges survives in unusually good condition, preserved by the centuries spent behind closed doors.

One feature gives the identity away at a glance. The crown of the head rises in a pointed, egg-like dome, the trait that marks every authenticated portrait of Enchin. The temple notes that this version softens the likeness toward an idealized image of the master rather than a strictly faithful one.

Such early portraits are rare. Only a handful of sculpted images of Chishō Daishi predate the Kamakura period, and the two at Onjō-ji are treated as the benchmark against which the others are read. The image was named an Important Cultural Property in 1900 and raised to National Treasure status in 1952.

The Temple Around the Hall

Onjō-ji, known to almost everyone as Mii-dera, sits on a wooded slope above the southern shore of Lake Biwa. The popular name comes from a sacred spring on the grounds, said to have provided the water for the first baths of three early emperors. The temple holds an exceptional concentration of National Treasures and Important Cultural Properties, among them the main hall, several painted images, and the famed Yellow Fudō.

The Daishidō where the statue rests lies inside the Tōin, a walled precinct closed to general visitors. The name Tōin, meaning "Tang cloister," recalls the scriptures Enchin brought back from his studies in China and kept here. Most travelers will not see the secret statue itself, but the walk up to the gate, past the three-story pagoda and the ordination hall, gives a sense of why this spot was treated as the temple's holiest ground.

There is plenty to fill a half-day. The Kannon-dō, the fourteenth station on the Saigoku pilgrimage of thirty-three Kannon temples, opens onto a wide view of Lake Biwa. The evening bell counts among the Eight Views of Ōmi and the three most celebrated bells in Japan. More than a thousand cherry trees draw crowds in early April, and the maple-lined approach turns red in autumn. Near the gate, a two-century-old shop still serves chikara-mochi, skewered rice dumplings dusted with green soybean flour.

Mii-dera is a short walk from Miidera Station on the Keihan Ishiyama-Sakamoto line, or a quick bus ride from JR Ōtsu and Ōtsukyō stations. The grounds keep daytime hours and charge a modest admission. To stand before the Naka-son Daishi, plan around the single opening on 29 October, and bear in mind that photography of the statue is not allowed.