Fukusai-ji Temple

Overview

Fukusai-ji (福済寺, ふくさいじ, Fukusai-ji) is a Buddhist temple of the Ōbaku (黄檗, おうばく) school of Zen, located in Nagasaki on the island of Kyushu. Its honorary mountain-name prefix, or sangō (山号, さんごう), is Bunshizan (分紫山, ぶんしざん). The temple was founded in 1628, during the Edo period (1603–1868), in the fifth year of the Kan'ei era (寛永, かんえい). It is counted as one of the Three Chinese Temples in Nagasaki (長崎三福寺, ながさきさんぷくじ), a group of temples established by and for the Chinese community of the port city.

History

Fukusai-ji was founded in 1628, the fifth year of Kan'ei. Nagasaki in the early Edo period was the principal gateway through which Chinese merchants, sailors and artisans entered Japan. The Tokugawa shogunate confined foreign trade to a small number of controlled channels, and Nagasaki's Chinese residents formed a distinct community, known as the Tōjin (唐人, とうじん), with its own customs, language and religious practice.

The Three Chinese Temples were built to serve that community. Each was associated with a different group of Chinese settlers, distinguished by the province from which they had come, and each enshrined a patron deity brought from the mainland. Fukusai-ji, founded in 1628, belongs to this group alongside its two counterparts in the city. The temples functioned not only as places of worship but as meeting halls, hostels for newly arrived merchants and resting places for the dead, since Chinese residents who died in Nagasaki could not be buried in Japanese Buddhist cemeteries.

The temple's affiliation with the Ōbaku school reflects the Chinese character of the institution. The Ōbaku (黄檗) school of Zen was introduced to Japan in the seventeenth century by Chinese monks, most famously Yinyuan Longqi (隠元隆琦, いんげんりゅうき), who arrived in 1654 and later founded Manpuku-ji (萬福寺, まんぷくじ) in Uji. Ōbaku practice preserves Chinese liturgical forms, including the reading of sutras in a Chinese-derived pronunciation, and its temples in Nagasaki were natural centres for the Chinese diaspora.

What Stands There Today

The temple grounds lie in the city of Nagasaki, at coordinates 32.7533083, 129.8749722.

The most conspicuous feature of the site is a large statue of the bodhisattva Kannon (観音, かんのん), the figure of compassion. The statue is hollow and contains a spiral ramp that visitors can climb, passing displays of Buddhist statuary and imagery arranged inside the body of the figure. From the upper levels, the view extends over the city of Nagasaki and its harbour.

The temple also holds a museum space, and the grounds contain memorial monuments connected to the Chinese community of Nagasaki and to the dead of the twentieth century. The site was rebuilt in the decades after the Second World War, when the original temple buildings had been lost.

The Name in Japanese

The temple's name is written 福済寺 and read ふくさいじ (Fukusai-ji).

The first character is 福, read ふく (fuku) in this name. It means "fortune", "good luck" or "blessing". It is one of the most common characters in Japanese religious and personal names, and appears in the names of many temples and shrines.

The second character is 済, read さい (sai) here. Its core meaning is "to bring to completion", "to save" or "to relieve". In Buddhist usage it carries the sense of salvation — bringing beings across to the far shore, the traditional image of deliverance. The character also appears in everyday Japanese in the verb 済む (すむ, sumu), "to be finished", and in 経済 (けいざい, keizai), "economy".

The third character is 寺, read じ (ji). It means "temple" and is the standard suffix for a Buddhist temple in Japanese. Note that the reading changes with the name: 寺 is read てら (tera) when it stands alone, and じ (ji) or でら (dera) when attached to a temple name, as in 浅草寺 (せんそうじ, Sensō-ji) or 清水寺 (きよみずでら, Kiyomizu-dera).

Taken together, the name might be rendered as "Temple of Fortune and Salvation". The sangō, Bunshizan (分紫山, ぶんしざん), precedes the temple name in formal usage, as is customary for Ōbaku and other Zen temples.

Visiting and Context

Fukusai-ji stands in Nagasaki, a city whose history is inseparable from foreign contact. The temple is one of the Three Chinese Temples, and a visit is best understood as part of that set. The other two temples in the group lie nearby, and together they trace the footprint of the Chinese community that shaped Nagasaki's religion, cuisine and architecture during the Edo period.

The Kannon statue is the principal draw for most visitors. The interior ramp and the collections displayed within make the statue a small museum in itself, and the view from the top takes in the surrounding hills and the port.

Because the temple belongs to the Ōbaku school, visitors will encounter Chinese-derived forms of chant and ritual that differ from the Japanese Zen of the Rinzai (臨済, りんざい) and Sōtō (曹洞, そうとう) schools. For students of Japanese, the temple's name offers a compact lesson in how Buddhist vocabulary entered the language: 福 and 済 carry meanings that reach back to Chinese scripture, while 寺 shows how a single character changes its reading depending on what it is attached to.