Hōon-ji Temple

Overview

Hōon-ji (報恩寺) is a Sōtō Zen Buddhist temple in the city of Morioka, Iwate Prefecture, in the far north of Japan's main island of Honshu. The Sōtō school (曹洞宗, Sōtō-shū) is one of the two great Zen traditions of Japanese Buddhism, the other being Rinzai; it emphasises seated meditation, or zazen, and traces its Japanese lineage to the monk Dōgen in the thirteenth century. Hōon-ji's founding is dated to 1362, in the first year of the Jōji era (貞治), which places it squarely in the Muromachi period (1336–1573). Its principal image is a statue of Shaka Nyōrai — Shakyamuni, the historical Buddha — but the temple is best known for something else entirely: a hall housing statues of the 500 Rakan, the enlightened disciples of Buddhist tradition.

History

The temple's origins lie not in Morioka but further north, at Sannohe, the seat of the Nanbu clan. The Nanbu were the dominant warrior house of the region that is now northern Iwate and eastern Aomori, and Hōon-ji was built under their patronage. The thirteenth chieftain of the clan, Nanbu Moriyuki, is credited with establishing the temple in 1394.

The decisive turn came in 1601. By then the Tokugawa shogunate had taken power nationally, and it ordered the Nanbu to move their seat south to Morioka Castle. The twenty-seventh chieftain of the clan, Nanbu Toshinao — the first daimyō of Morioka Domain — carried out the relocation, and the temple moved with him. This was standard practice for a warrior house's favoured temples: they followed the lord, because the lord's authority and the temple's prestige were bound together.

Under the Nanbu in Morioka, Hōon-ji flourished. Through the Edo period it functioned as a seminary, a centre for training and educating monks, and it served as the head temple of a network of 280 temples spread across the Nanbu domains. That made it one of the most important religious institutions in the whole of the region.

The temple's history also carries a violent episode from the end of the samurai order. In 1869, during the Boshin War that accompanied the Meiji Restoration, the Ōuetsu Reppan Dōmei — a northern alliance of domains that resisted the new imperial government — collapsed. Narayama Sado, a karō (家老, a senior domain councillor), committed seppuku inside the temple's Hondō, its main hall.

What Stands There Today

The temple's most celebrated structure is the Rakan-dō (羅漢堂), the hall of the Rakan. It was built in 1735 and rebuilt in 1858. Its central statue, a Rushana butsu — Vairocana, the cosmic Buddha — is reported to be the work of Kōbō-daishi, the posthumous name of Kūkai, the ninth-century monk who founded the Shingon school.

Around that central image stand the statues of the 500 Rakan: the arhats of Buddhist tradition, depicted as individual figures with distinct faces and expressions. These were made in Kyoto and later brought north to Morioka. Among the figures represented are Kublai Khan, the thirteenth-century Mongol ruler, and Marco Polo, the Venetian traveller whose account of Asia shaped European ideas about the region. Their presence among a Buddhist assembly reflects the wide, cosmopolitan imagination that Japanese sculptors of the Rakan brought to their work.

The Name in Japanese

The temple's name is written 報恩寺. Its reading in kana is ほうおんじ, and in romaji it is Hōon-ji. The long ō in the first part of the name is held for two beats, so the word is pronounced roughly "HOH-on-jee."

The name breaks into three kanji:

• 報 — read here as ほう (hō). It means to repay, requite, or report back. It is the character in 報酬 (hōshū, reward) and 報告 (hōkoku, a report).
• 恩 — read here as おん (on). It means a debt of gratitude, a benefit received, kindness shown by another. It appears in 恩人 (onjin, a benefactor) and 感謝 (kansha, gratitude), where the same idea of owing something to someone underlies the word.
• 寺 — read here as じ (ji). It means a Buddhist temple. This is the standard suffix on temple names across Japan, as in 清水寺 (Kiyomizu-dera) or 金閣寺 (Kinkaku-ji).

Together, 報恩 means "repaying a debt of gratitude" or "requiting kindness received." A 報恩寺 is therefore a "temple of requited blessings" — a foundation dedicated to giving back, in religious practice, what one has received. The name is not unique to this temple; other Japanese temples carry it as well. The final 寺 shifts in pronunciation depending on what precedes it, appearing as -ji here and as -dera in names such as Kiyomizu-dera, which is why the romanisation is Hōon-ji rather than Hōon-dera.

Visiting and Context

Hōon-ji stands in Morioka, the capital of Iwate Prefecture, at coordinates roughly 39.71° north and 141.16° east. Morioka is a castle town, laid out around the castle that Nanbu Toshinao occupied from 1601, and the temple's presence there is a direct consequence of that relocation. The city is served by the Tōhoku Shinkansen and by conventional rail lines, and the temple sits within the urban area, reachable from Morioka Station.

For readers of Japanese, the temple's name is a compact lesson in how Buddhist vocabulary works. 寺 is one of the most productive characters in the language of religion and place, and the -ji versus -dera split is a pronunciation pattern worth noticing early. 報 and 恩 both belong to the register of obligation and gratitude that runs through Japanese social language — the same 恩 that appears in expressions of indebtedness — which makes the temple's name unusually transparent once the characters are known. The Rakan-dō, with its 500 individually carved figures and its unlikely pair of foreign notables, gives the vocabulary a place to attach to.