Ryōzen-ji Temple

Overview

Ryōzen-ji (霊山寺, りょうぜんじ) is a Shingon Buddhist temple in Naruto, Tokushima Prefecture, on the island of Shikoku. It is the first of the eighty-eight temples of the Shikoku Pilgrimage, the circular route that connects temples associated with the monk Kūkai across the four prefectures of Shikoku. The temple belongs to the Kōyasan branch of Shingon and is dedicated to Shaka Nyorai, the historical Buddha.

Its founding is dated to the year 800, in the Heian period (794–1185), during the nineteenth year of the Enryaku era. Because it sits close to the crossing point used by pilgrims arriving from the Kansai region, it has served for centuries as the gateway to the pilgrimage: the place where the route begins and, for many, the place to which it returns.

History

The temple's foundation is traditionally attributed to Gyōki, the itinerant monk credited with spreading Buddhism through the Japanese countryside in the Nara period. The buildings that stand today are later replacements, erected after fires destroyed earlier structures.

Ryōzen-ji's position at the head of the pilgrimage was fixed in the Edo period. In 1687 the monk Yūben Shinnen published the Shikoku henro michishirube, a guidebook to the route, and identified Ryōzen-ji as temple number one. Later guidebooks followed his numbering, and the sequence he established is the one pilgrims still walk.

A custom has grown up around the temple's role as the starting point: pilgrims who complete the full circuit are expected to return to Ryōzen-ji for a thanksgiving visit, called orei mairi (お礼参り), to give thanks for a safe journey. This practice is generally regarded as a relatively recent development rather than an ancient obligation.

What Stands There Today

The temple occupies a wooded site in the Ōasa-chō Bandō district of Naruto, at the northeastern edge of Shikoku, close to the point where travellers from Kansai cross into the island. Its halls and pagoda are reconstructions, the originals having been lost to fire over the centuries.

The main image of worship is Shaka Nyorai. As the first temple of the route, Ryōzen-ji maintains the equipment and services that departing pilgrims expect: staffs, sedge hats, and white coats for those setting out, and the stamp and calligraphy — the nōkyō (納経) — that pilgrims collect at every temple as proof of their visit. The temple's stamp is the first entry in every pilgrim's book.

The Name in Japanese

The temple's name is written 霊山寺. It is read りょうぜんじ in kana, and romanised as Ryōzen-ji. The long ō in the second syllable is a genuine long vowel, not an accident of spelling: it is held roughly twice as long as the o in an English word like "go".

Broken down character by character:

• 霊 — read ryō here. The character means "spirit", "soul", or "sacred/miraculous". It appears in words connected with the spirit world and with places held to be holy.
• 山 — read zen here. On its own the character means "mountain" and is normally read yama or san. In this name it takes the unusual reading zen, a change that reflects the way the three characters were pronounced together as a single unit rather than separately.
• 寺 — read ji. This character means "temple" and appears at the end of the names of Buddhist temples throughout Japan. It is the standard suffix that tells a reader the building is a Buddhist foundation rather than a Shintō shrine.

The whole name, 霊山寺, translates literally as "Vulture Peak Temple". Vulture Peak — Ryōjusen in Japanese, from the Sanskrit Gṛdhrakūṭa — is the mountain near Rājagaha in India where the Buddha is said to have preached several sutras. Naming a Japanese temple after it was a way of asserting a connection to the original Buddhist homeland, and the same name is shared by other temples in Japan.

Two readings in one short name are worth noting for learners. 山 as zen and 寺 as ji are both sound changes that occur when characters are compounded, and they show why memorising a temple's name as a single spoken unit is more reliable than assembling it character by character.

Visiting and Context

Ryōzen-ji is the first of the eighty-eight temples. The next stop on the route is Gokuraku-ji, and the final temple of the circuit is Ōkubo-ji, number eighty-eight, in Kagawa Prefecture. Pilgrims who walk the full route therefore begin at Ryōzen-ji and, if they follow the thanksgiving custom, end their journey by coming back to it.

The temple's location explains its role. Naruto sits near the crossing from the Kansai region onto Shikoku, so travellers arriving from Kyoto, Osaka, or further east reached Ryōzen-ji before any other temple on the route. A guidebook that began the numbering here was describing what pilgrims already did.

For students of Japanese, the temple is a useful case study in how Buddhist vocabulary entered the language: a Sanskrit place name rendered into Chinese characters, given a Japanese reading, and then attached to a building in Tokushima Prefecture. The word 寺 at the end of the name is one of the most productive elements in Japanese place naming, and recognising it makes temple names across the country legible at a glance.