Hōrai-ji Temple

Overview

Hōrai-ji (鳳来寺, ほうらいじ, Hōrai-ji) is a Buddhist temple of the Shingon sect (真言宗, Shingon-shū) in the city of Shinshiro, in eastern Aichi Prefecture. Its principal image is Yakushi Nyōrai (薬師如来), the Buddha of healing, known in Sanskrit as Bhaiṣajyaguru. The temple stands on Mount Hōrai, a peak of 695 metres, and the climb to it is made by a stairway of 1,425 steps. The temple grounds have been protected as a Place of Scenic Beauty and Natural Monument since 1931.

History

The temple was founded in 702, the second year of the Taihō era (大宝, Taihō), during the Asuka period (飛鳥時代, Asuka jidai), the stretch of Japanese history running from 538 to 710 in which Buddhism took root in the country and the first permanent capitals were built. The Taihō era is itself notable in Japanese record-keeping: the Taihō Code (大宝律令, Taihō ritsuryō), the legal system that gave shape to the centralised state, was promulgated in the first year of the same era. Hōrai-ji therefore belongs to the earliest layer of Buddhist institutional history in Japan, when temples were being founded across the archipelago under imperial and aristocratic patronage.

The dedication to Yakushi Nyōrai places Hōrai-ji within a widespread pattern of early Japanese Buddhism. Yakushi, the healing Buddha, was among the first deities to receive dedicated worship in Japan, and temples to him were often founded with the health of the sovereign or the state in mind. The Shingon affiliation by which the temple is known today reflects a later ordering of Japanese Buddhism; Shingon (真言宗, Shingon-shū, "True Word school") was established in Japan by Kūkai (空海) in the early ninth century, and many older temples were subsequently absorbed into its network.

The temple's long association with Mount Hōrai has shaped its history as much as any single founder or patron. For centuries the site was a destination for mountain asceticism as well as conventional worship, and its remoteness in the hills of what is now Aichi Prefecture preserved it through periods when lowland temples were repeatedly destroyed.

What Stands There Today

The approach to Hōrai-ji is the 1,425-step stone stairway that climbs Mount Hōrai to the temple buildings. The temple's principal object of worship remains the image of Yakushi Nyōrai. The grounds, together with their surroundings, hold the double designation of Place of Scenic Beauty and Natural Monument conferred in 1931, a status that recognises both the landscape and its living features.

Among those features is a population of Eurasian scops owl (コノハズク, konohazuku), a small owl that nests in the area. The bird is the prefectural bird of Aichi Prefecture, which gives the temple's forest setting an official as well as a natural significance. The combination of a protected landscape, a designated fauna population and a working Shingon temple makes the mountain a single integrated site rather than a monument set apart from its surroundings.

The Name in Japanese

The temple's name is written 鳳来寺. Its reading in kana is ほうらいじ, and in romaji it is Hōrai-ji. The macron over the first o marks a long vowel, so the first element is pronounced "Hō" rather than a short "Ho".

The name breaks into three characters:

• 鳳 — read ほう (hō) here. The character means a phoenix, specifically the mythical Chinese fenghuang, a bird of auspicious omen associated with the empress and with the south. It is a dense, many-stroked character, and in ordinary Japanese it appears mostly in proper names and in the word 鳳凰 (hōō), "phoenix".
• 来 — read らい (rai) here. This is a very common character meaning "to come". Its usual readings are く (ku) as a verb and らい (rai) in compounds. In this name it carries the sense of coming or arriving, so 鳳来 together suggests "the phoenix comes" — an auspicious phrase rather than a literal description.
• 寺 — read じ (ji) here. The character means a Buddhist temple. It is the standard suffix for temple names in Japanese, and it appears in hundreds of them, from Sensō-ji in Tokyo to Tōdai-ji in Nara. When it begins a word it is read てら (tera), as in 寺 (tera, "temple"); in compounds it shifts to ji.

Two pronunciation points matter for anyone saying the name aloud. First, the long vowel in ほう is held for two beats, not one. Second, the final じ is voiced — ji, not shi — which distinguishes 寺 in temple names from the unvoiced し heard elsewhere. The full name is therefore four morae: ho-o-ra-i-ji, conventionally written Hōrai-ji.

The mountain takes the same name, Mount Hōrai (鳳来山, Hōrai-san), so the temple and its peak are named together. The phoenix element also connects the name to Mount Hōrai (蓬莱, Hōrai) of Chinese legend, the mountain of the immortals, which is written with different characters but pronounced identically. Whether or not the naming was deliberate, Japanese readers hear the echo.

Visiting and Context

Hōrai-ji sits in the hills of Shinshiro, a city in the Okumikawa region of Aichi Prefecture, at coordinates roughly 34.98° north and 137.59° east. The temple is reached on foot, and the 1,425 steps are the defining fact of a visit: the climb is long, and the reward is a temple on a protected mountain rather than a roadside hall.

For students of Japanese, the site is a compact lesson in how temple names work. The suffix 寺 (ji) marks the building as Buddhist; the middle character 来 (rai) is one of the most frequent verbs in the language; and the initial 鳳 (hō) is the kind of character that appears almost exclusively in names, so learning it here pays off mainly in place names. The long vowel in Hōrai-ji is the detail most often missed by learners, and it is the one that marks the pronunciation as Japanese rather than an approximation.