Myōhon-ji Temple

Overview

Myōhon-ji (妙本寺, みょうほんじ) is a Buddhist temple of the Nichiren sect in Ōmachi, a district of Kamakura in Kanagawa Prefecture, south of Tokyo. It was founded in 1260, the first year of the Bun'ō era (文応, ぶんのう), which places its origins in the Kamakura period (1185–1333) — the stretch of medieval history when Kamakura was the seat of Japan's military government and the city filled with temples.

The Nichiren sect (日蓮宗, にちれんしゅう) is the tradition that traces its lineage to the monk Nichiren (日蓮, にちれん), who lived from 1222 to 1282 and taught that the Lotus Sutra contained the complete and final teaching of the Buddha. Myōhon-ji is counted among the oldest Nichiren temples in Kamakura. Its formal name is Chōkō-zan Myōhon-ji (長興山妙本寺, ちょうこうざん みょうほんじ), with Chōkō-zan serving as the temple's mountain name — the honorific prefix that Japanese temples traditionally carry in place of a street address.

History

The temple's founding date of 1260 falls in the middle of Nichiren's career, during the years when he was based in Kamakura and pressing his case against the established schools of Buddhism. The site stands in Ōmachi, in the eastern part of the city, an area of low hills and narrow valleys that became one of the densest concentrations of Nichiren temples in Japan.

The two halves of the temple's formal name carry a family history. Chōkō (長興) is taken from the posthumous name of Nichiren's father, and Myōhon (妙本) from the posthumous name of his mother. The temple therefore commemorates the founder's parents in its own name — an unusual and intimate piece of naming for a major religious institution, and one that ties the Ōmachi site directly to Nichiren's family rather than to a shogunal patron or a aristocratic sponsor.

What Stands There Today

Myōhon-ji occupies a wooded precinct in Ōmachi, reached by passing through a large temple gate and then climbing a flight of stone steps that runs between high earthen banks. The approach is famous in Kamakura for its greenery: the slopes on either side are thick with vegetation, and the grounds are associated with the blossoms of the temple's trees in early summer.

The temple is an active Nichiren sect foundation, not a museum piece. Its buildings serve a working congregation, and the cemetery grounds within the precinct hold graves associated with the temple's long history in the district.

The Name in Japanese

The temple's name is written 妙本寺. Its kana reading is みょうほんじ, and its romanised form is Myōhonji — often written Myōhon-ji with a hyphen to mark the boundary between the name and the suffix.

Character by character:

• 妙 — read みょう (myō) in this word. The character means "wondrous", "exquisite", "mysterious", or "excellent". It is a word of high praise in Buddhist writing, and it opens the titles of several important sutras, most famously the Lotus Sutra, known in Japanese as the Myōhō-renge-kyō (妙法蓮華経). In the temple's name it comes from the posthumous name of Nichiren's mother.
• 本 — read ほん (hon) in this word. The character means "book", "origin", "root", or "foundation" — the sense here is "origin" or "source". It is one of the most common characters in Japanese, and its reading shifts with context: moto when it stands alone meaning "origin", hon in compounds such as 日本 (Nihon, Japan) or 本寺 (honji, head temple).
• 寺 — read じ (ji) in this word. The character means "temple". It is the standard suffix for a Buddhist temple in Japanese, and it appears in the names of thousands of them. Note the reading: the character is read tera when it stands alone, but ji when attached to a name, as here.

So the name breaks down as myō + hon + ji: "wondrous origin temple". The full formal name, 長興山妙本寺, adds the mountain name Chōkō-zan in front: 長 (chō, "long"), 興 (kō, "prosper" or "rise"), 山 (zan, "mountain"). The reading zan rather than the everyday yama is the convention for mountain names in temple titles.

Visiting and Context

Ōmachi sits in the eastern part of Kamakura, within walking distance of Kamakura Station and close to several other Nichiren foundations, including Myōhō-ji (妙法寺) and Ankokuron-ji (安国論寺). The three are often grouped together as the Nichiren temples of the eastern hills, and a single walk can take in all of them.

The temple's position in the Kamakura period gives it a particular value for a student of Japanese: the city's place names, temple names and era names — Bun'ō (文応) among them — are the vocabulary in which the medieval history of the language is written. The nengō (年号, ねんごう) system of era names, in which years are counted anew from each era's start, is still in use in Japan today, and Bun'ō 1 is the form in which 1260 appears in Japanese historical writing.