Kikō-ji Temple

Overview

Kikō-ji (喜光寺, きこうじ) is a Buddhist temple in Nara, the city that served as Japan's capital for most of the eighth century. It was founded in 722, during the Nara period (710–794), in the sixth year of the Yōrō era (養老, ようろう). The temple belongs to the Yamato Northern 88 Sacred Sites, a pilgrimage circuit of temples across the northern part of the old Yamato region. Its main hall, built in the Muromachi period, and the Heian-period statue of Amida Nyorai housed inside it are both designated Important Cultural Properties.

History

Kikō-ji was established in 722, the sixth year of the Yōrō era. That places its founding in the middle of the Nara period, a stretch of roughly eighty years when the imperial court sat at Heijō-kyō, the grid-planned capital whose streets underlie the modern city of Nara. This was the age of the great state-sponsored temples, when the court commissioned the colossal bronze Buddha at Tōdai-ji and built provincial temples in every region of the country.

The temple's foundation date is recorded in the era name Yōrō, which ran from 717 to 724. Japanese era names, or nengō (年号, ねんごう), were adopted from Chinese practice and changed at the accession of an emperor or in response to auspicious and inauspicious events; dating a temple's founding to "Yōrō 6" is the standard way pre-modern Japanese records anchor an event in time.

The buildings that survive at the site are considerably later than the founding. The Hondō (本堂, ほんどう), the main hall that enshrines the temple's principal image, dates to the Muromachi period, the era of Ashikaga shogunal rule that ran from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century. The Amida Nyorai (阿弥陀如来, あみだにょらい) enshrined within it is older, dating to the Heian period, the centuries from 794 to 1185 when the court and much of Japanese religious life shifted to what is now Kyoto.

What Stands There Today

The temple's centrepiece is its Hondō, the Muromachi-period main hall. A Hondō is the building within a temple complex that houses the honzon (本尊, ほんぞん), the principal object of worship. Kikō-ji's Hondō and the Heian-period Amida Nyorai enshrined inside it are both classified as Important Cultural Properties, a national designation applied to buildings, sculptures and other objects of particular historical or artistic value.

Amida Nyorai is the Buddha of Infinite Light, the central figure of the Pure Land tradition, which teaches that those who call on Amida with sincere faith are reborn in his pure land after death. Images of Amida were produced in enormous numbers in the Heian period, when devotion to him spread through both the aristocracy and the wider population. A Heian-period Amida preserved in a Muromachi hall means the temple's two most valued holdings come from two distinct eras of Japanese history, several centuries apart.

Kikō-ji is one of the Yamato Northern 88 Sacred Sites. Yamato (大和, やまと) is the old name for the region around Nara, and the circuit of eighty-eight temples across its northern districts follows a pattern familiar from the better-known eighty-eight-temple pilgrimage on the island of Shikoku. Pilgrims visiting the northern Yamato sites travel between Nara's historic temples, and Kikō-ji is one stop on that route.

The Name in Japanese

The temple's name is written 喜光寺. It is read きこうじ in kana, and romanised as Kikō-ji. The long ō in the romanisation reflects the Japanese long vowel, held for roughly twice the length of a short o.

The name breaks into three kanji:

喜 — read ki here. The character means "joy", "delight" or "rejoicing". It is the same character used in words like 喜ぶ (よろこぶ, yorokobu), "to be glad".

光 — read kō here. The character means "light", "radiance" or "glow". It appears in 光 (ひかり, hikari), "light", and in the name of the Amida Buddha, the Buddha of Infinite Light.

寺 — read ji here. The character means "temple" and is one of the two standard suffixes for Buddhist temple names in Japanese, the other being 院 (いん, in). It appears in the names of temples across the country, from Tōdai-ji to the smallest local halls.

Put together, 喜光寺 carries the sense of a "temple of joyful light". The reading of the first two characters, ki and kō, is an example of on'yomi (音読み, おんよみ), the Sino-Japanese reading of a kanji, the pronunciation layer borrowed from Chinese alongside the characters themselves. The final 寺 is also read with its on'yomi, ji. A temple name built entirely from on'yomi is common in Japanese Buddhism, and it means the name is pronounced the same way across the country regardless of local dialect.

Note that the romanised form uses a macron over the o in Kikō, and that the final element is written -ji, not -tera. Both 寺 readings exist: tera is the native Japanese reading, or kun'yomi (訓読み, くんよみ), and appears in temple names such as Ishiyama-dera. Kikō-ji uses the Sino-Japanese ji.

Visiting and Context

Kikō-ji stands in Nara, at coordinates 34.684722, 135.777778, in the northern part of the city. Nara was Japan's capital during the Nara period, and the city remains one of the country's principal concentrations of early Buddhist architecture and sculpture. A visitor to Nara can see eighth-century temples, Heian and Muromachi buildings, and the surviving works of the same religious culture that produced Kikō-ji's Amida.

For students of Japanese, the temple's name is a compact lesson in how Buddhist vocabulary entered the language. The characters 喜, 光 and 寺 each carry a meaning and a set of readings, and the temple name combines three of them using the on'yomi layer. Recognising 寺 as the standard temple suffix makes it possible to parse hundreds of temple names at a glance, and recognising 光 as "light" links the temple's name to Amida, the Buddha of Infinite Light, whose Heian-period image the temple preserves.