Rozan-ji Temple

Overview

Rozan-ji (廬山寺, ろざんじ, Rozanji) is a Tendai Buddhist temple in Kamigyō-ku, Kyoto, founded in 938 — the first year of the Tengyō era (天慶, てんぎょう), during the Heian period. It belongs to the Tendai school, the great Japanese Buddhist tradition centred on Mount Hiei above Kyoto, and it stands today on the eastern side of the Kyoto Imperial Palace.

The temple's founder was Ryōgen, abbot of Enryaku-ji, the Tendai head temple on Mount Hiei. Rozan-ji was originally built in the Funaokayama neighbourhood, south of Daitoku-ji, before its later move into the city's grid.

Rozan-ji was one of four temples granted an okurodo (御黒戸, おくろど), a private Buddhist chapel for the Imperial Family that was originally maintained inside the Imperial Palace itself. The other three were Nison-in, Hanjū-in, and Kengō-in. These four temples belong directly to the Imperial Household rather than to any ordinary parish network.

History

Ryōgen founded Rozan-ji in 938 at Funaokayama. The temple's fortunes were bound up with the Tendai establishment on Mount Hiei, and that association nearly destroyed it. During Oda Nobunaga's assault on the temples of Kyoto — and specifically on the Tendai branch and the siege of Mount Hiei — Rozan-ji was shielded from destruction by a nyōbō hosho (女房奉書, にょうぼうほうしょ), an official document recording the orders and words of the emperor, written out by the female court member Madenokoji Fusako.

In 1573 the temple was moved to its present location on Teramachi Street as part of Toyotomi Hideyoshi's reorganisation of Kyoto. Reconstruction was later completed under the directive of Emperor Kōkaku.

Fire undid much of that work. The reconstructed temple was devastated in the Kyoto fire of 1708, the fifth year of the Hōei era (宝永, ほうえい), and again in 1788, the eighth year of the Tenmei era (天明, てんめい), during the Great Fire of Kyoto. The present structure was rebuilt in 1794, the sixth year of the Kansei era (寛政, かんせい), using a portion of the Sentō Imperial Palace.

What Stands There Today

The buildings standing at Rozan-ji date from the 1794 reconstruction, assembled from materials taken from the Sentō Imperial Palace. The temple occupies its Teramachi Street site on the eastern side of the Kyoto Imperial Palace, in Kamigyō-ku.

Its best-known feature is the rock garden, called the Genji Garden (源氏庭, げんじてい, Genjitei), named after the titular character of The Tale of Genji. The garden is noted for its Japanese bellflowers.

Rozan-ji is also counted among the 33 Sacred Sites of Luoyang Kannon, a pilgrimage circuit of Kannon temples in and around Kyoto. "Luoyang" here is a name for Kyoto itself: the city was laid out in imitation of Chinese capitals, and its western and eastern halves were called Chang'an and Luoyang after the great Chinese cities.

The Name in Japanese

The temple's name is written 廬山寺. It is read ろざんじ in kana, and romanised as Rozanji — sometimes written Rozan-ji, with the hyphen marking the boundary between the temple's name and the suffix.

Broken down character by character:

• 廬 — read ro here. The character means a hut, cottage, or temporary dwelling, and it is the first element of the Chinese mountain name Lushan.
• 山 — read zan here (the base reading is san, voiced to zan in compounds). It means mountain. Together, 廬山 (Rozan) is the Japanese rendering of Lushan, the mountain in China.
• 寺 — read ji. It means temple, and it is the standard suffix for a Buddhist temple's name.

The temple's sangō (山号, さんごう) — literally "mountain name", the honorific mountain title that Japanese Buddhist temples carry regardless of whether they sit on a mountain — is Mount Lu, or Lushan, pronounced rozan in Japanese. The temple is named after that Chinese mountain.

The name carries a second layer. Lushan is the mountain associated with Huiyuan, the monk whose community there became a founding reference point for Chinese Pure Land Buddhism. Naming a Tendai temple after Lushan places it within that wider East Asian Buddhist geography, not merely within Kyoto.

The temple is also known as Rozan Tendaikoji, which spells out its Tendai affiliation in the name itself.

Visiting and Context

Rozan-ji sits in Kamigyō-ku, on the eastern side of the Kyoto Imperial Palace, on Teramachi Street. The coordinates are 35.0245833, 135.7683472.

For readers of Japanese, the temple offers a compact lesson in how temple names work. The final character 寺 (ji) appears in temple names across the country, and recognising it lets a reader identify a building as a Buddhist temple at a glance. The middle character 山 (san, here zan) is the same character that appears in the names of hundreds of Japanese mountains and, by extension, in the mountain titles that temples carry. The first character 廬 is rare in everyday Japanese, and it survives here mainly as a piece of literary and religious vocabulary tied to the Chinese mountain.

The Genji Garden connects the temple to The Tale of Genji, the eleventh-century court narrative that is one of the central texts of classical Japanese literature. For learners, the garden's name is a useful anchor: 源氏 (Genji) is the surname of the tale's hero, and 庭 (tei, てい) means garden.