Daijuji Temple

A Postwar Meditation Hall Built for Full-Time Trainees

Daijuji Monks' Hall (大樹寺僧堂, also written Daiju-ji Sōdō) is the meditation and residence hall of a Soto Zen temple in Fukuchi, Yazu Town, Tottori Prefecture, built in 1955, renovated in 2011, and entered on Japan's register of Tangible Cultural Properties on August 15, 2024. It stands northeast of the main hall and faces west, a timber single-story building of 166 square meters under a tiled hip-and-gable roof.

A sōdō is not a chapel and not a dormitory, though it does some of the work of both. In the Soto school it is the room where trainee monks sit zazen, take meals, and sleep, all within the same allotted space. Everything about the architecture follows from that. The floor is packed earth rather than boards. There are no interior partitions. A corridor of the same earthen construction runs around the outside of the single room, and the ceiling overhead is a plain saobuchi type, thin battens carrying flat boards, the sort of ceiling one finds in an ordinary farmhouse.

The contrast with the main hall a short walk away is deliberate. That building has a coved coffered ceiling and dense relief carving on its porch. This one has almost nothing. Zen training halls are supposed to be plain, and a carpenter working in 1955 knew exactly which register to build in.

The Tan and the Sacred Monk

Down the east and west sides of the room, three rows of raised platforms are set out. These are the tan. Each monk is assigned one, roughly the width of a single tatami mat, and that measure of space is the whole of his physical world during training: he sits facing the wall on it during zazen, eats his meals on it from stacked bowls, and unrolls his bedding on it at night. The Japanese expression for entering a monastery, tan o kakeru, literally means to hang up one's tan.

Three rows is a great many. Most rural training halls manage one or two. The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes the building as unusually large for its type and records the tradition that Daijuji was once the only officially recognized training monastery, a senmon sōdō, in the whole Chugoku region, the five prefectures of Tottori, Shimane, Okayama, Hiroshima, and Yamaguchi. The agency's own wording treats this as a claim carried by the temple rather than a documented fact, and it deserves the same caution here. What the building itself confirms is the ambition: someone in 1955 expected enough monks to fill three rows of platforms.

At the center of the room sits an image of Manjushri, the bodhisattva of wisdom. In a Soto training hall this figure occupies the position of the shōsō, the sacred monk, and is treated as a member of the assembly rather than as an object of worship. Trainees bow to him on entering. He faces the same direction the monks do.

Registration No. 31-0294 was granted in the 107th round of listings under the criterion covering contribution to the historic character of the national landscape. Three other Daijuji buildings were registered on the same August day: the main hall of 1920, the Founder's Hall of 1951, and the bell tower of 1954. Taken together they document a compound rebuilt across the first half of the twentieth century, with the monks' hall as the last major piece to go up.

Visiting, and What Is Actually Visible

Honesty about access matters here. A working sōdō is not a museum room, and there is no published schedule for viewing the interior. What Daijuji does offer is participation: the temple accepts people for zazen on request, and it states that non-Japanese speakers can be accommodated provided they either understand Japanese or bring an interpreter. Sitting in the hall is therefore possible in a way that simply looking at it may not be. Arrangements go through the temple by telephone at 0858-74-0854.

The exterior is straightforward to see from the grounds, which are open. Look at the roof first. The irimoya hirairi form, entered from the long eaves side, matches the main hall and the founder's hall, and the three roofs read as a set from below. Then look at how little the building announces itself. The 2011 renovation kept that quality intact.

Getting there: 408 Fukuchi, Yazu Town, Yazu District, Tottori Prefecture 680-0307. Free parking on site. Around 20 minutes by car from JR Higashi-Kōge Station, or about 30 minutes from the Kawahara interchange on the Tottori Expressway. A Yazu bus toward Ochiiwa departs from Higashi-Kōge Station. Photography inside the hall should be cleared with the temple in advance. If the visit falls between late November and early April, the temple's celebrated uraku-tsubaki camellia will be in flower on the entrance steps, a town-designated cultural property of some 400 years standing.