Tōfuku-ji Temple

Tōfuku-ji is a great Zen monastery in southeastern Kyoto, but it is its gardens and its ravine of maples that most people come to see. Around the abbot's quarters, the Hōjō, lie four gardens laid out in 1939 by Mirei Shigemori, the most original Japanese garden designer of the 20th century; it was his first major commission, and the moss garden in particular became a landmark of the modern renewal of Japanese garden art. The temple calls the ensemble the Garden of the Eight Aspects, with a separate composition on each of the four sides of the building, mixing raked gravel, stone and moss in an unmistakably modern geometry.

The monastery was founded in 1236 by the imperial chancellor Kujō Michiie, who took its name from two great temples of Nara, Tōdai-ji and Kōfuku-ji. Its first abbot was the monk Enni, who had studied Rinzai Zen in China under Wuzhun Shifan; a portrait of his teacher painted in 1238, which Enni brought back with him, is still kept here. Tōfuku-ji was counted among the Five Mountains, the leading Zen temples of Kyoto, and was conceived in the image of the public monasteries of Zhejiang. After a fire in 1319 a merchant ship was sent to Yuan China in 1323 for materials and objects to rebuild it; it sank off Korea, and when the wreck, now known as the Shinan ship, was found in 1975, many of its wooden cargo tags still bore the temple's name. The two-storey main gate is the oldest sanmon in Japan and a National Treasure. Another fire in 1881 destroyed the main hall and much else, and the hall was rebuilt in 1917; in 1933 the painter Inshō Dōmoto covered its ceiling with a great blue dragon, finished in seventeen days. The complex once counted dozens of sub-temples and still has about two dozen.

The Tsūten-kyō, a covered wooden bridge linking the abbot's quarters with the founder's hall, spans a small wooded gorge planted with Japanese maples, and viewing the autumn leaves from it is a Kyoto tradition depicted by Hiroshige. The temple says that the unusual three-lobed maples, which turn golden, were brought from Song China by Enni himself. Two more old wooden bridge-corridors cross the same stream, one of them built in 1603.

Kyoto, Japan's imperial capital for more than a thousand years, holds an exceptional concentration of temples, shrines and gardens; Tōfuku-ji lies in the Higashiyama ward, at the southern end of the hills that frame the city to the east.

Getting there

Tōfuku-ji is in Higashiyama-ku, about 5 km south-east of central Kyoto. Tōfukuji Station, served by the JR Nara Line and the Keihan Main Line, is about ten minutes' walk away, and the JR Nara Line reaches it in a few minutes from Kyoto Station. The nearest airport is Osaka Itami (ITM), about 37 km away.