Wooden Horto Kokushi Seated Statue

The Seated Portrait of Hotto Kokushi at Kokoku-ji

In a quiet valley at Yura, on the coast of Wakayama Prefecture, stands Kokoku-ji, a Rinzai Zen temple of the Myoshinji line. Among its treasures is a seated wooden portrait of the monk who turned this place into one of the most influential Zen centres in medieval western Japan. He is known by the honorary title Hotto Kokushi, but his religious name was Shinchi Kakushin, and he lived from 1207 to 1298. The sculpture shows him as an old man, seated in formal robes, and it was carved during his own lifetime.

Kakushin's biography reads like a map of thirteenth-century exchange between Japan and China. Born in the mountains of Shinano, in present-day Nagano, he trained first in the esoteric teachings on Mount Koya before turning to Zen. In 1249 he sailed to Song China, travelled among its great monasteries, and received the seal of enlightenment from the master Wumen Huikai, compiler of the famous koan collection known as the Gateless Gate. He returned in 1254, and in 1258 the layman Gansho, who had founded the temple here to pray for the soul of the assassinated shogun Minamoto no Sanetomo, invited Kakushin to take it over and reshape it as a Zen temple.

A Portrait Carved From Life

The statue belongs to a genre the Japanese call chinso, the formal portrait of a Zen teacher. In the Zen tradition such portraits carried real weight, because the line of transmission from master to disciple was treated as the living core of the school. A chinso was not decoration; it stood in for the teacher's presence and authority. Carving one while the subject was still alive, as a so-called longevity portrait, made the link between image and person especially direct.

National records date this image to 1286, when Kakushin was about eighty. The Kamakura period was the great age of realistic portrait sculpture in Japan, and a chinso of this kind aimed less at idealised beauty than at the particular face of a particular man: the set of the shoulders under heavy robes, the lines of an aged face, the steady gaze of someone long accustomed to teaching. A second portrait of Kakushin survives far to the west at a temple in Fukuyama, carved a decade earlier when he was sixty-nine; placed beside the Kokoku-ji image, it lets viewers trace how the sculptors recorded the same man at different stages of his life.

The image was designated an Important Cultural Property on 14 December 1931. Kokoku-ji also holds a painted hanging-scroll portrait of Kakushin and an early document of monastic regulations, both likewise designated, so the temple preserves an unusually full record of its founder in more than one medium.

The Monk Who Changed Japanese Kitchens

Part of what makes a visit to Kokoku-ji memorable is that Kakushin's influence reached well beyond religion. While studying in China he learned to make a fermented paste known in Japanese as kinzanji miso, named after a Chinese monastery he had visited. He brought the method home, and according to long tradition the liquid that gathered during its fermentation led to the development of soy sauce, with the nearby town of Yuasa remembered as its birthplace. The same monk is credited with introducing the shakuhachi bamboo flute as practised by the wandering komuso monks; he returned from China with four lay players, and Kokoku-ji became the head temple of that tradition. For a single figure to sit at the root of both Japanese seasoning and a school of music is rare, and the temple keeps these threads alive at its yearly memorial service on 13 October, when the flute is played in his honour.

The temple itself was burned in 1585 during Toyotomi Hideyoshi's campaign in the Kii region and rebuilt from 1601 under the local lord Asano Yoshinaga, so the present halls postdate the founder by centuries. Yura is reached by the JR Kisei line and a short onward trip; the setting is rural and unhurried, with a strong local tradition of fire festivals and tengu folklore layered over the Zen history. Because the portrait is a temple treasure rather than a permanently displayed object, visitors who hope to see the sculpture itself should contact the temple in advance about viewing.