Shōhō-ji Temple

Overview

Shōhō-ji (正法寺, しょうぼうじ) is a Buddhist temple in Gifu, the capital city of Gifu Prefecture in central Honshu. It belongs to the Ōbaku school (黄檗宗, Ōbaku-shū), a Zen tradition that reached Japan from China in the seventeenth century and retained far more of its Chinese character than the older Rinzai and Sōtō schools. Shōhō-ji is a branch temple of Mampuku-ji (萬福寺, まんぷくじ) in Uji, south of Kyoto, the head temple of the Ōbaku school.

The temple's official name is Kinpōzan Shōhō-ji (金鳳山正法寺, きんぽうざん しょうぼうじ), in which Kinpōzan — "Golden Phoenix Mountain" — serves as the temple's mountain name, the conventional honorific prefix carried by Japanese Buddhist temples. The temple is large by the standards of Japanese temples, and its architecture and ritual observances follow Chinese models rather than the Japanese styles typical of the Rinzai and Sōtō traditions.

Shōhō-ji is best known as the home of the Gifu Great Buddha (岐阜大仏, Gifu Daibutsu), a monumental image of the Buddha housed on its grounds.

History

Shōhō-ji was founded in 1638, in the fifteenth year of the Kan'ei era (寛永, かんえい). Kan'ei ran from 1624 to 1644, so the temple dates from the middle of that period, during the reign of the shogun Tokugawa Iemitsu. Japan was then some three and a half decades into the Edo period (1603–1868), an era of Tokugawa shogunal rule in which the country was governed from Edo — modern Tokyo — under a strict system of regional domains and regulated temple affiliations.

The site carries an earlier association as well: it is referenced in connection with the Battle of Funada (船田合戦, Funada Kassen), a Sengoku-period engagement fought in Mino Province, the territory that corresponds largely to present-day Gifu Prefecture. The temple itself therefore postdates the battle by decades, but the location is tied in local memory to that conflict.

What Stands There Today

The temple's principal monument is the Gifu Great Buddha, one of the three great Buddha images of Japan. The image is housed in a hall on the temple grounds and is the reason most visitors make the trip; the temple's Chinese-style buildings and its scale relative to ordinary Japanese temples shape the experience of the precinct as a whole.

Because Shōhō-ji belongs to the Ōbaku school, its building style and its sacraments preserve Chinese forms. A visitor familiar with the austere, unpainted timber of older Japanese Zen temples will find something visibly different here: the Ōbaku tradition carried over Ming-dynasty Chinese conventions of construction and decoration, and Shōhō-ji's size and layout reflect that inheritance.

The Name in Japanese

The temple's name is written 正法寺 and read しょうぼうじ in kana; in romaji it is Shōhōji, sometimes written Shōhō-ji with a hyphen to mark the morpheme boundary. The long vowels are held for two beats each: shō and hō, then ji.

Breaking the name down character by character:

• 正 — read しょう (shō) here. It means "correct," "right," or "true." It is the same character used in 正しい (tadashii, correct) and in the name of the Shōtoku era.
• 法 — read ほう (hō) here. It means "law," "method," or "principle," and in Buddhist vocabulary it renders the Sanskrit dharma — the teaching of the Buddha. The compound 正法 (shōbō) therefore means "the true Dharma," the correct teaching.
• 寺 — read じ (ji) here. It means "temple." This is the standard suffix for a Buddhist temple's name, and it appears in countless Japanese temple names, from Sensō-ji in Tokyo to Tōdai-ji in Nara.

So 正法寺 means, transparently, "Temple of the True Dharma." The reading of 寺 shifts depending on the name: it is ji in Shōhō-ji, but tera when the word stands alone (お寺, o-tera, a temple). The full official name, 金鳳山正法寺, adds the mountain name: 金 (kin, gold), 鳳 (pō, phoenix — here in its Chinese-derived reading), 山 (zan, mountain).

Visiting and Context

Shōhō-ji stands in Gifu city, at coordinates roughly 35.43° north and 136.77° east, in the plain of the Nagara River below Gifu Castle's Mount Kinka. Gifu is served by the Tōkaidō Shinkansen at Gifu-Hashima and by regular JR lines into Gifu Station, and the temple is a short trip from the city centre.

For students of Japanese, the temple offers a compact lesson in how temple names are built: a mountain name in Chinese-style readings, a doctrinal phrase rendered in kanji, and the ubiquitous suffix 寺. The presence of an Ōbaku temple in Gifu also illustrates how far the school's network extended from its Kyoto base at Mampuku-ji after its introduction to Japan in the seventeenth century — the same decades in which Shōhō-ji was founded.