Eisan-ji Temple

Overview

Eisan-ji (栄山寺, えいさんじ, Eisanji) is a Buddhist temple in the city of Gojō, in Nara Prefecture, Japan. It belongs to the Shingi-Shingon school of Japanese Buddhism, and its central object of worship — the honzon (本尊, ほんぞん, the principal image enshrined in a temple's main hall) — is Bhaiṣajyaguru Buddha, known in Japanese as Yakushi Nyorai (薬師如来, やくしにょらい), the Buddha of healing.

The temple's full name is Gakushō-san Eisan-ji (学晶山 栄山寺). The first element, Gakushō-san, is a sangō (山号, さんごう, a temple's honorific "mountain name"), a convention borrowed from Chinese monastic practice in which a temple is named as though it sat on a mountain, whether or not one is present.

Eisan-ji was founded in 719, the third year of the Yōrō era (養老, ようろう), during the Nara period (710–794). Two of its holdings are singled out as parts of the temple's identity: the Octagonal Hall and the temple bell.

History

Eisan-ji was established in 719, early in the Nara period. That era saw the Japanese court at Heirak-kyō — the capital laid out on a Chinese grid plan — sponsor Buddhism on a scale that produced the great state temples of Nara, among them Tōdai-ji and Kōfuku-ji. Eisan-ji belongs to that same broad wave of Nara-period Buddhist foundation, though it stood well to the south of the capital, in the Yamato countryside of what is now Gojō.

The temple's date of 719 falls in the third year of the Yōrō era. Japanese era names (nengō, 年号, ねんごう) were adopted from Chinese practice and were changed at the court's discretion, often to mark auspicious events or to break a run of misfortune; Yōrō was proclaimed in 717 and ran for eight years, so the temple's founding is recorded as Yōrō 3.

Over the centuries Eisan-ji came to belong to the Shingi-Shingon school (新義真言宗, しんぎしんごんしゅう, "New Doctrine Shingon"), a branch of Shingon Buddhism that traces its lineage to the priest Kakuban (覚鑁, かくばん), who in the twelfth century sought to reform Shingon practice and consolidate its teachings around devotion to Amida and the esoteric rites of the Shingon tradition. Shingon itself had been brought to Japan from Tang China in the early ninth century by Kūkai (空海, くうかい), the monk and scholar also known by his posthumous title Kōbō Daishi. Eisan-ji's honzon, Yakushi Nyorai, is one of the oldest and most widely venerated figures in Japanese Buddhism: the healing Buddha, whose cult was closely tied to the protection of the state and the health of the emperor in the Nara period.

What Stands There Today

The temple's best-known surviving structure is its Octagonal Hall, a Nara-period building designated a National Treasure. The octagonal plan is rare in Japanese temple architecture and carries a specific association: octagonal halls were built in this period for memorial rites for the dead, most famously the octagonal halls raised at Nara's great temples. The Eisan-ji hall is one of the small number of such buildings to survive from the Nara period, which gives it an importance well beyond the temple's modest size.

The temple bell is also recorded as one of the temple's notable holdings. Temple bells (bonshō, 梵鐘, ぼんしょう) were cast in bronze and hung in a bell tower; in the Nara and Heian periods they were objects of considerable technical skill and expense, and an original bell from this era is a rare survival.

The temple stands at coordinates 34.3559440, 135.7206670, in Gojō, in the southern part of the Nara basin where the terrain begins to rise toward the Kii Peninsula.

The Name in Japanese

The temple's name in Japanese is 栄山寺. Its reading in kana is えいさんじ, and in romanised form it is Eisanji — often written with a hyphen as Eisan-ji to make the word boundary clear to readers of English.

The name breaks down into three characters:

栄 — read here as ei. This kanji means "flourish", "prosper", "glory" or "honour". It appears in many auspicious compounds and in personal names. Its presence at the head of a temple name carries the sense of a place where the Dharma flourishes.

山 — read here as san. This kanji means "mountain". In temple names it is the standard second element of the sangō, the honorific mountain name described above. Note that the reading shifts from the native Japanese yama to the Sino-Japanese san in this compound, which is why the temple is Eisan-ji and not Eiyama-dera.

寺 — read here as ji. This kanji means "temple" or "monastery" and is the single most common suffix in Japanese Buddhist temple names. It has a native Japanese reading, tera, used when the character stands alone or in names like Tera-machi ("Temple Town"), but in compounds it is normally read ji.

Put together, 栄山寺 is Ei + san + ji: "Prosperity-Mountain Temple". The full name Gakushō-san Eisan-ji (学晶山 栄山寺) adds a second mountain name in front, a common pattern in which a temple carries both a sangō and a formal temple name.

Two practical notes for learners. First, the character 寺 is read ji in the great majority of temple names, so recognising it lets a reader identify a building as a temple at a glance — the counterpart suffix for shrines is 神社 (jinja). Second, the romanisation Eisanji can be split in speech as Ei-san-ji, with the n before j often sounding close to m in rapid speech, though the standard romanisation keeps the n.

Visiting and Context

Eisan-ji sits in Gojō, a city in the south of Nara Prefecture. The area lies within the historic Yamato heartland, the region around the old capitals where the densest concentration of early Japanese Buddhist architecture survives. Travellers basing themselves in Nara or in the pilgrimage country of the Kii Peninsula can reach Gojō by rail, and the temple is one of the principal reasons a visitor with an interest in Nara-period building would make the trip.

For readers of Japanese, the temple's name is a compact lesson in how temple names are built: an auspicious first character, the standard san of a mountain name, and the ubiquitous ji that marks a Buddhist foundation. The same three-part pattern recurs across Japan, and once the pattern is recognised, temple names stop looking like arbitrary strings of characters and start reading as descriptions.