Hase-dera Temple

Overview

Hase-dera (長谷寺, はせでら) is a Buddhist temple in the Hase district of Kamakura, in Kanagawa Prefecture, south of Tokyo. It is a Jōdo-shū temple, the school of Buddhism founded around the Pure Land teachings of Hōnen, and it is best known for a large wooden statue of Jūichimen Kannon — the eleven-headed Kannon, the Bodhisattva of Compassion. The temple is commonly called the Hase-kannon (長谷観音), a nickname that fuses the place name with the name of the deity enshrined there.

Hase-dera is a stop on several pilgrimage circuits. It belongs to the Bandō Sanjūsankasho (坂東三十三箇所), a thirty-three-temple Kannon pilgrimage across the Kantō region, and to the thirty-three sacred Kannon sites of Kamakura. It is also one of the Kamakura Enoshima Shichifukujin, the seven lucky gods circuit that links temples and shrines in Kamakura and Enoshima.

The temple's full name is Kaikō-zan Jishō-in Hase-dera (海光山慈照院長谷寺). Kaikō-zan is the mountain name, a conventional part of a Japanese temple's formal title, and Jishō-in is the name of the monastic compound.

History

Hase-dera traces its founding to the year 736, during the Nara period (710–794), in the eighth year of the Tenpyō era (天平). The Nara period was the age of Japan's first permanent capital and of the great state-sponsored temples of Nara itself, and Buddhist institutions were spreading outward from the capital into the provinces.

The temple takes its name from an older Hase-dera in Yamato Province, the region around present-day Nara. The Kamakura temple was named after that earlier site, a practice that tied a new foundation to the prestige of an established one.

The temple began within the Tendai school, the broad tradition that dominated Japanese Buddhism in the early centuries after its introduction and that had its headquarters on Mount Hiei above Kyoto. Over time Hase-dera moved away from Tendai affiliation and became an independent temple of the Jōdo-shū, the Pure Land school. That shift places the temple within the broad realignment of Japanese Buddhism that followed the Kamakura period, when new schools emphasising devotion and the recitation of the Buddha's name spread widely.

What Stands There Today

The temple's central object of worship is a wooden statue of Jūichimen Kannon, the eleven-headed Kannon. Kannon is the Bodhisattva of Compassion, and the eleven heads that crown this manifestation are understood to represent the deity's vigilance in every direction, watching for suffering wherever it arises. The statue at Hase-dera is among the largest wooden images of Kannon in Japan and is the reason the temple is known simply as the Hase-kannon.

The temple occupies a hillside site in the Hase valley, with the main hall set above terraced grounds. The grounds are planted with hydrangeas, which draw large numbers of visitors when they flower in early summer.

The Name in Japanese

The temple's name is written 長谷寺. It is read はせでら in kana, and romanised as Hase-dera.

The name breaks down into three kanji:

• 長 — read はせ (hase) in this name. The character means "long" or "chief" in its ordinary readings, but here it carries the place name Hase, the district of Kamakura where the temple stands. Place names frequently assign kanji a reading unrelated to their everyday meaning.
• 谷 — also read はせ (hase) here, as the second half of the same place name. On its own the character means "valley," which fits the geography of the Hase district, a valley running inland from the coast. The two characters 長谷 together spell the place name; the reading はせ attaches to the pair, not to each character separately.
• 寺 — read でら (dera), the character for "temple." This is the standard element in Japanese temple names. Note the voicing: the character is read tera in isolation but dera when it follows another element in a compound, a common sound change in Japanese.

So 長谷寺 is literally "the temple of Hase," and the name is shared with the older Hase-dera in Yamato from which this temple's name was taken. The everyday nickname 長谷観音 (Hase-kannon) swaps the final 寺 for 観音, the name of the bodhisattva enshrined inside.

Visiting and Context

Hase-dera sits at coordinates 35.3124640, 139.5329950, in the Hase neighbourhood of Kamakura. The area is one of the densest concentrations of historic religious sites in the Kantō region, and Hase-dera is within walking distance of several of them, which makes it a natural stop on a day's circuit of the city.

For readers of Japanese, the temple is a useful case study in how place names and temple names work. The reading of 長谷 as はせ cannot be predicted from the individual characters, and the voicing of 寺 to でら depends on its position in the compound. Both patterns — irregular place-name readings and sound changes in compounds — recur constantly in Japanese toponyms, and Hase-dera shows them side by side in a single three-character name.

The temple's membership in the Bandō Sanjūsankasho and the Kamakura pilgrimage circuits reflects a wider practice in Japanese religion: pilgrims travel fixed routes of numbered sites, collecting stamps and inscriptions at each. Hase-dera's place on those routes, together with its Kannon statue and its hillside hydrangeas, keeps it among the most visited religious sites in Kamakura.