Kiyomizu-dera

Kiyomizu-dera, the Temple of Pure Water, occupies a wooded hillside on Mount Otowa at the eastern edge of Kyoto. The name refers to the Otowa waterfall, whose spring the temple was founded around. It is the head temple of the small Kita-Hossō school, which separated from the Nara-based Hossō school in 1965, and the sixteenth stop on the Saigoku pilgrimage to thirty-three Kannon temples in western Japan.

The main hall is built in the kake-zukuri style: its front section, the famous butai or stage, stands out over the slope on a framework of tall zelkova pillars joined without nails. The present hall was rebuilt in 1633 under the third Tokugawa shogun, Iemitsu, after fires, and its cypress-bark roof was renewed in a restoration completed in 2020.

Around the main hall stand some thirty buildings, including the vermilion Niō-mon gate, a three-storey pagoda and the Oku-no-in hall with a second, smaller stage. The approach streets Kiyomizu-zaka, Sannen-zaka and Ninen-zaka form one of the best-preserved historic townscapes in the city.

According to temple tradition, the monk Enchin found the spring of Otowa in 778 and enshrined Kannon here; the general Sakanoue no Tamuramaro, famed for campaigns in the north-east, then built a hall around 798. Kiyomizu-dera became one of the most popular pilgrimage temples of the Heian capital and appears in The Pillow Book and The Tale of Genji. It burned many times; most of the present buildings date from the reconstruction under Tokugawa Iemitsu in the 1630s.

The phrase "to jump off the stage at Kiyomizu" is the Japanese idiom for taking a bold decision; temple records show that people actually did so in the Edo period in the belief that surviving would grant a wish, until the practice was forbidden in 1872. Since 1995 the temple's chief priest has brushed the Kanji of the Year on the stage every December, a ritual widely reported across Japan.

The temple and its approach streets are central to Kyoto's seasonal calendar, with cherry blossom in spring, autumn colours in the valley below the stage, and evening illuminations in these seasons. Jishu-jinja, a shrine to the deity of matchmaking, stands just behind the main hall.