Zenko-ji

According to its founding legend, Zenkō-ji's principal image — a triad of Amida and two attendant bodhisattvas sharing a single halo — was sent from the Korean kingdom of Baekje in the sixth century, thrown into a canal during the conflict over Buddhism at court, and later recovered by a man named Honda Yoshimitsu, who carried it home to Shinano. The temple takes its name from the Sino-Japanese reading of his given name. The image is an absolute hidden Buddha: it is never shown, not even to the priests.

The temple belongs to no single school. It is run jointly by the Daikanjin, a Tendai temple with 25 sub-temples, and the Daihongan, a Jōdo convent with 14 sub-temples, whose head is traditionally a nun from a noble family. Because it welcomed people regardless of sect, sex or status, Zenkō-ji became one of the great pilgrimage destinations of Japan, summed up in the saying that everyone should visit it at least once in a lifetime.

The main hall, completed in 1707, is among the largest wooden buildings in eastern Japan. Its roof is of an unusual T-shaped form called shumoku-zukuri, covered in cypress bark. Beneath the inner sanctuary runs the Okaidan, a pitch-dark passage in which worshippers feel their way along the wall to touch a metal lock said to bring salvation.

Tradition dates the temple to 644. It enjoyed the patronage of the Kamakura shoguns, and in the medieval period itinerant preachers spread belief in the Zenkō-ji Amida across Japan, carrying copies of the image. During the civil wars of the sixteenth century the image was taken by Takeda Shingen to Kōfu and later passed through the hands of Oda Nobunaga, Tokugawa Ieyasu and Toyotomi Hideyoshi before returning to Nagano in 1598.

The temple burned many times. The present main hall, the twelfth by tradition, was completed in 1707 with funds raised by touring the image around Japan. The Sanmon followed in 1750 and the sutra repository in 1759. The town that grew around the temple became the prefectural capital in the Meiji era, and the main hall was designated a National Treasure in 1953.

Zenkō-ji's openness made it a temple of the people. The legend of an old woman who chased a cow to the temple and found faith — 'led by a cow to Zenkō-ji' — became a proverb for being drawn to something good by chance. The shukubō, temple lodgings along the approach, have housed pilgrims for centuries and still take in visitors.

The temple's greatest event is the Gokaichō, held once every seven years by the traditional count (every six years in practice), when the Maedachi Honzon, a copy standing in for the hidden image, is displayed and a long cord links it to a pillar in the courtyard that crowds come to touch. Each morning the O-asaji service is held at dawn, when the abbot and abbess bless kneeling worshippers on the way to and from the hall.