Gōtoku-ji Temple

Overview

Gōtoku-ji (豪徳寺, ごうとくじ, Gōtoku-ji) is a Buddhist temple in the Gōtokuji district of Setagaya ward, Tokyo. It belongs to the Sōtō school of Zen, one of the two large Zen lineages in Japan. The temple's full name is Daikeizan Gōtoku-ji (大谿山 豪徳寺).

The temple is best known today for two things. It was the family temple of the Ii clan, the lords of Hikone Domain, and it is famous for its large collection of maneki-neko (招き猫, まねきねこ), the beckoning cat figurines found in shops and restaurants across Japan. Because of this, it is often called the "cat temple."

History

Gōtoku-ji was founded in 1480, during the Muromachi period (1336–1573). At that time it was called Kōtoku-in (弘徳院). The foundation year falls in Bunmei 12 (文明十二年), the twelfth year of the Bunmei era.

For its first century and a half the temple was a local institution. That changed in 1633, when the surrounding region came under the ownership of the Hikone Domain. The temple was renamed "Edo Bodaiji" — the bodai-ji, or family temple, of the Ii clan in Edo. A bodai-ji (菩提寺, ぼだいじ) is a temple that maintains the graves of a family and performs memorial rites for its dead, so the renaming marked a change in the temple's role, not just its name.

In 1659 the temple received its present name, Gōtoku-ji, taken from the posthumous Buddhist name of Ii Naotaka (井伊直孝), the second feudal lord of Hikone Domain. Naming a temple after a patron's posthumous name was a way of binding the institution permanently to that person's memory.

The Ii were among the most prominent daimyō families of the Edo period, and Gōtoku-ji served as their burial ground. The precincts hold the tombs of successive lords of the Ii clan and their wives. Among them is the grave of Ii Naosuke (井伊直弼), the thirteenth head of the Ii clan, who also served as a rōjū (老中, ろうじゅう), a senior councillor in the Tokugawa shogunate.

What Stands There Today

The temple grounds contain the tombs of the Ii lords and their wives, arranged as a family cemetery rather than a single monument. The grave of Ii Naosuke is among them.

The most visible feature for visitors is the maneki-neko. Small beckoning cat figures are sold and left at the temple in large numbers, and rows of them line parts of the precinct. The association between the temple and the beckoning cat is the reason Gōtoku-ji is widely known in Tokyo and beyond.

The temple stands in the Gōtokuji district of Setagaya ward, the neighbourhood that carries the temple's name. Its coordinates are roughly 35.65° north, 139.65° east, in the western part of Tokyo.

The Name in Japanese

The temple's name is written 豪徳寺. It is read ごうとくじ in kana, and rendered in romaji as Gōtoku-ji. The macron over the first o marks a long vowel: the ごう is held longer than a plain ご.

Broken down character by character:

• 豪 — read here as ごう (gō). The character means "magnificent," "grand," or "powerful." On its own it is a strong, imposing word, the kind used in names meant to convey stature.
• 徳 — read here as とく (toku). It means "virtue," "merit," or "moral excellence." In Buddhist usage it also carries the sense of merit accumulated through good deeds, which is why it appears so often in temple names.
• 寺 — read here as じ (ji). It means "temple." This is the standard suffix for a Buddhist temple in Japanese, and it appears in names across the country.

So the whole name reads as something like "the temple of grand virtue." That is a fitting name for a temple, but it is not the name the temple started with. As noted above, 豪徳寺 was adopted in 1659 from the posthumous Buddhist name of Ii Naotaka, which means the characters were chosen for a person before they were chosen for the building.

Two practical notes for learners. First, the reading じ for 寺 is the regular one in temple names, but the same character is read てら (tera) when it stands alone as a common noun. Second, the temple's original name, Kōtoku-in (弘徳院), shares the 徳 character with the current name — the same "virtue" element carried through the renaming.

Visiting and Context

Gōtoku-ji sits in Setagaya ward, in the west of Tokyo, in a district named after it. The temple is a Sōtō Zen institution, which places it in the same lineage as Eihei-ji and Sōji-ji, the two head temples of the school.

For readers studying Japanese, the temple is a useful case study in how Japanese names work. The name is not a description of the place; it is a memorial to a person. The same pattern appears throughout Japanese temple and place names, where a posthumous Buddhist name, a patron's title, or a founder's name becomes fixed to a location and eventually to the neighbourhood around it. The district of Gōtokuji exists because the temple does, and the temple is named for Ii Naotaka.

The temple's history also shows how the Edo-period domain system shaped religious geography. When the Ii clan took control of the region in 1633, the temple's function changed to serve the family's memorial needs, and its name changed again in 1659 to reflect that relationship. A single temple can carry the marks of several different eras in its name, its buildings, and its graves.