Shōfuku-ji Temple

Overview

Shōfuku-ji (聖福寺, しょうふくじ) is an Ōbaku Zen Buddhist temple in Nagasaki, on the southern island of Kyushu. Its honorary mountain-name prefix, or sangō (山号, さんごう), is Manjusan (万寿山, まんじゅざん). The temple belongs to the Ōbaku school (黄檗宗, おうばくしゅう), a tradition of Zen Buddhism that reached Japan from China in the seventeenth century and carried with it Chinese monastic rules, Chinese chanting, and Chinese architectural forms.

Shōfuku-ji stands in the city of Nagasaki, the port that served for most of the Edo period (1603–1868) as Japan's principal window on the outside world. It was completed in 1677, the fifth year of the Enpō era (延宝, えんぽう), and was the fourth in a series of temples raised in the city by its resident Chinese community.

History

From the early seventeenth century, Nagasaki's Chinese residents organised themselves by native region, and each regional community built and maintained its own temple. Shōfuku-ji was the work of merchants from the Canton region, and its construction was completed in 1677.

The temple is closely tied to the lineage of Ingen (隠元, いんげん), the Chinese monk who brought the Ōbaku school to Japan. Shōfuku-ji was founded by a disciple of Ingen, his grandson in the dharma lineage, Tetsushin Dōhan. That lineage connection matters, because it distinguishes Shōfuku-ji from the three earlier Chinese temples of Nagasaki — Fukusai-ji, Sōfuku-ji and Kōfuku-ji. Those three did not initially belong to the Ōbaku sect, and for that reason Shōfuku-ji is not always grouped with them, despite being the fourth temple in the sequence.

What Stands There Today

Shōfuku-ji remains an active Ōbaku temple in Nagasaki, at the coordinates 32.7530472, 129.8770750. The sangō Manjusan is preserved in the temple's formal name, and the Ōbaku affiliation established at its founding continues to define its practice and its place among the city's Chinese-founded temples.

The Name in Japanese

The temple's name is written 聖福寺. Its kana reading is しょうふくじ, and its romaji is Shōfuku-ji. The final じ is voiced, so the last character is read ji rather than tera — a common shift in temple names.

Character by character:

• 聖 — read here as しょう (shō). It means "holy", "sacred" or "sage". In ordinary modern Japanese the same character is read sei in compounds and hijiri on its own, but in this temple name it takes the Sino-Japanese reading shō.
• 福 — read here as ふく (fuku). It means "fortune", "good luck" or "blessing". This is the same character found in the names of the other Chinese temples of Nagasaki, Sōfuku-ji (崇福寺) and Kōfuku-ji (興福寺), and in the everyday word 福 (ふく, fuku), "good fortune".
• 寺 — read here as じ (ji). It means "temple". On its own the character is read てら (tera), and it appears in temple names in both forms: -ji in Shōfuku-ji, -dera in names such as Hōryū-ji's neighbours and countless others.

Put together, the name can be glossed as "Temple of the Sacred Fortune" or "Temple of Holy Blessing". The sangō prefix, Manjusan (万寿山, まんじゅざん), breaks down as 万 (man, "ten thousand"), 寿 (ju, "longevity") and 山 (san, "mountain") — "Mount of Ten Thousand Longevities". A sangō is a formal epithet that many Japanese temples carry in front of their name, and it is often written on the main gate.

For learners, the name is a useful study case: it shows the character 寺 shifting between tera and ji, and it shows 福, one of the most frequent characters in Japanese place and temple names, in a devotional context rather than the everyday one of 福 (ふく) meaning simple good luck.

Visiting and Context

Shōfuku-ji sits within Nagasaki, a city whose Chinese temples are among its most distinctive historic sites. Readers tracing the Chinese presence in Edo-period Nagasaki will meet Shōfuku-ji alongside Fukusai-ji, Sōfuku-ji and Kōfuku-ji — with the caveat that Shōfuku-ji, founded later and from the outset in the Ōbaku line of Ingen through Tetsushin Dōhan, is sometimes treated separately from the other three.

The temple's date of 1677 places it in the middle of the Edo period, in the Enpō era, a generation after the establishment of the Tokugawa shogunate's controls on foreign trade and religion. Nagasaki was where those controls were administered, and where the Chinese merchant communities that built temples such as this one lived and worked. The vocabulary of the site — sangō, Ōbaku, the regional merchant communities — is the vocabulary of that world, and the temple's name preserves it in three characters.