Ishite-ji Temple

Overview

Ishite-ji (石手寺) is a Shingon temple in Matsuyama, Ehime Prefecture, on the island of Shikoku. It is Temple 51 on the Shikoku 88 temple pilgrimage, the circuit of Buddhist sites associated with the monk Kūkai that rings the island. The temple was founded in 729, the first year of the Tenpyō era, during the Nara period (710–794).

Shingon is the school of Japanese Buddhism that Kūkai brought back from China in the ninth century; its name means "true word," a reference to the mantra and ritual practice at the centre of its teaching. Ishite-ji belongs to this school and sits within the city of Matsuyama, in the district of Ishite.

History

The temple's traditional founding date is 729, the opening year of the Tenpyō era. That places its origin in the Nara period, when Buddhism was still largely a religion of the court and the great state temples of the capital, and more than eighty years before Kūkai is said to have reorganised the pilgrimage route.

The temple is named after Emon Saburō, a figure from the legends surrounding the Shikoku pilgrimage. In the best-known version of the story, Emon Saburō was a wealthy and hard-hearted man who refused alms to a wandering monk; he later set out to find the monk again and travelled the island repeatedly in search of him. The temple's name is tied to that story, which is why the temple is named after him rather than after a Buddhist deity or a founder.

A conflagration is recorded among the temple's significant events, meaning the temple burned at some point in its long history. The temple has also served as a link in the pilgrimage chain: it follows Taisan-ji Temple and is followed by Hanta-ji Temple, the temples numbered immediately before and after it on the route.

What Stands There Today

Seven of Ishite-ji's structures have been designated National Treasures or Important Cultural Properties, a status conferred by the Japanese government on buildings and objects of outstanding historical or artistic value. The Niō Gate, Ishite-ji is among the temple's constituent structures; a Niō gate is the entrance gateway guarded by a pair of fierce protector figures, the Niō, whose name means "benevolent kings."

The temple stands at coordinates 33.8478611, 132.7964722, in the Ishite district of Matsuyama. Matsuyama is the capital of Ehime Prefecture, on the north-west coast of Shikoku.

The Name in Japanese

The temple's name is written 石手寺. It is read in kana as いしてじ, and in romaji as Ishite-ji.

Broken down character by character:

• 石 — read ishi in this word. It means "stone."
• 手 — read te in this word. It means "hand."
• 寺 — read ji in this word. It means "temple." This is the standard character for a Buddhist temple, and it appears at the end of the names of most of the pilgrimage sites.

The first two characters combine as 石手, Ishite, "stone hand." The final character 寺, ji, marks the building as a temple. The full name therefore means something like "Stone Hand Temple," and it is a direct reference to the Emon Saburō legend attached to the site.

Two notes on reading are useful here. First, 寺 is read ji in this compound but tera when it stands alone as a word; both readings are common in temple names across Japan. Second, the -ji ending is shared by many of the Shikoku pilgrimage temples, so recognising it lets a reader identify a temple name at a glance even without knowing the rest of the characters.

Visiting and Context

Ishite-ji is the fifty-first of the eighty-eight temples on the Shikoku pilgrimage, a route that traditionally begins at Ryōzen-ji in Tokushima Prefecture and ends at Ōkubo-ji in Kagawa Prefecture. Pilgrims on the circuit are called ohenro, and the standard practice is to visit the temples in numerical order, so Ishite-ji comes after Taisan-ji, Temple 52 in the conventional numbering of the route as walked, and before Hanta-ji, Temple 50.

The temple's location inside Matsuyama makes it one of the more accessible stops on the pilgrimage. Matsuyama is a substantial city with rail connections to the rest of Shikoku and to Honshu, and the temple sits in the Ishite district within the city rather than in remote mountain country. For a reader studying Japanese, the name is worth memorising in all three forms — 石手寺, いしてじ, Ishite-ji — because it combines a place-specific legend with the single most common suffix in Japanese temple names.