Tairyū-ji Temple

Overview

Tairyū-ji (太龍寺) is a Shingon temple in Anan, a city on the eastern coast of Tokushima Prefecture on the island of Shikoku. It is Temple 21 on the Shikoku 88 temple pilgrimage, the circuit of Buddhist sites associated with the monk Kūkai that rings the island. Its principal image is Ākāśagarbha Bodhisattva, known in Japanese as Kokūzō Bosatsu (虚空蔵菩薩).

The temple belongs to the Kōyasan branch of Shingon, the school of Japanese Buddhism founded by Kūkai in the early ninth century. It also forms part of the Awa Chichibu Kannon circuit, a separate set of thirty-three Kannon sites in the old province of Awa, which corresponds roughly to modern Tokushima Prefecture. On the pilgrimage route, Tairyū-ji follows Kakurin-ji, Temple 20, and is followed by Byōdō-ji, Temple 22.

History

Tairyū-ji was founded in 793, during the Enryaku era — the twelfth year of that era name, which ran from 782 to 806. The date places the temple's founding in the Nara period, the stretch of Japanese history from 710 to 794 when the imperial capital stood at Nara.

The founder is traditionally identified as Kūkai, the monk later known as Kōbō Daishi, who was born in 774 in what is now Zentsūji in Kagawa Prefecture, on the same island of Shikoku. In 793 Kūkai was a young man of nineteen, still several years away from the voyage to China that would shape his Buddhism. The founding of Tairyū-ji is therefore placed in the period of his early ascetic practice in the mountains of Shikoku, before he left for the Tang capital at Chang'an in 804.

That early date makes Tairyū-ji one of the older sites on the Shikoku circuit, and it ties the temple to the landscape of Kūkai's youth rather than to his later career as an institutional founder. The Shikoku 88 temple pilgrimage as a formal circuit took shape many centuries afterwards, but its identity rests on the claim that each of its sites was established or visited by Kūkai himself.

What Stands There Today

The temple stands on the slopes of Mount Tairyū, in the Kamochō district of Anan, at roughly 33.88 degrees north and 134.52 degrees east. The site sits high in the mountains, and reaching it on foot involves a sustained climb through forest — a feature it shares with several of the more remote temples on the pilgrimage.

The main hall enshrines Ākāśagarbha Bodhisattva, the bodhisattva whose name means "womb of space" and who is associated in Shingon practice with memory, wisdom and the vastness of the mind. Ākāśagarbha is a relatively uncommon principal image among the eighty-eight temples, which more often enshrine Kannon, the bodhisattva of compassion.

A ropeway now runs up the mountain to the temple, giving pilgrims and visitors an alternative to the walking route. The temple's position within the Awa Chichibu Kannon circuit as well as the Shikoku pilgrimage means it receives both circuits' pilgrims.

The Name in Japanese

The temple's name is written 太龍寺. It is read in kana as たいりゅうじ, and in romaji as Tairyū-ji. The macron over the ū marks a long vowel: the "ryū" is held roughly twice as long as a short "ryu" would be.

Broken down character by character:

• 太 — read here as tai. The character means "great", "thick" or "fat", and it appears in many Japanese compounds as an intensifier or a term of grandeur. In this name it carries the sense of "great" or "grand".
• 龍 — read here as ryū. This is the character for "dragon", the long, serpentine creature of East Asian mythology that governs rain, clouds and water. It is a common element in temple and place names, and it is the character that gives the temple its English rendering, "Great Dragon Temple".
• 寺 — read here as ji. This character means "temple" or "Buddhist monastery", and it ends the names of a great many Japanese temples. When it appears as the final element of a name, it is normally read ji or dera.

So the whole name means "Great Dragon Temple". The reading of the first two characters together, tai-ryū, is the Sino-Japanese pronunciation of the compound; the final ji is the standard Sino-Japanese reading of 寺. Note that the character 龍 is the older, traditional form of the dragon character; in modern Japanese writing it is often replaced by the simplified 竜, which carries the same meaning and the same reading ryū.

Visiting and Context

Tairyū-ji is the twenty-first of the eighty-eight temples. Pilgrims walking the route in order arrive from Kakurin-ji, Temple 20, and continue afterwards to Byōdō-ji, Temple 22. The conventional pilgrimage direction runs clockwise around Shikoku, beginning at Ryōzen-ji in Tokushima Prefecture, so Tairyū-ji falls in the early, Tokushima section of the circuit.

Anan lies on the Pacific coast of eastern Shikoku, and the temple's mountain setting places it among the more physically demanding stops in the prefecture. The ropeway up Mount Tairyū is the usual approach for those not walking, and the summit area offers views over the surrounding mountains toward the coast.

For students of Japanese, the name is a compact lesson in how temple names are built: a descriptive or honorific element, a second element drawn from Buddhist or natural imagery, and the suffix 寺. The same three-part pattern recurs across the eighty-eight sites, and recognising it makes the names of the pilgrimage easier to read and remember.