Tennō-ji Temple

Overview

Tennō-ji (天王寺, てんのうじ, Tennō-ji) is a Buddhist temple of the Tendai school in the Yanaka district of Taitō ward, in the east of central Tokyo. It was founded in 1274, during the Kamakura period (1185 – 1333), which makes it one of the older religious sites in a part of the city that is often described as preserving the atmosphere of the old shitamachi (下町, したまち) — the low-lying merchant and artisan quarters of Edo and Tokyo. The temple is a member of the Yanaka Seven Lucky Gods circuit, a local pilgrimage route that links seven temples and shrines in the neighbourhood.

History

Tennō-ji was erected in 1274 by the monk Nichigen (日源). The foundation date falls in the eleventh year of the Bun'ei era (文永, ぶんえい), a nengō (年号, ねんごう) — era name — in use from 1264 to 1275. In 1274 the country was under the authority of the Kamakura shogunate, the military government that had been established at Kamakura, far to the south-west of the temple site, in 1185. The Bun'ei era is remembered in Japanese history chiefly for the first attempted Mongol invasion of 1274, the year Tennō-ji was founded.

The temple belongs to the Tendai school (天台宗, てんだいしゅう), one of the great traditions of Japanese Buddhism, which traces its lineage to the monastery on Mount Hiei above Kyoto and which supplied the intellectual and institutional framework for much of later Japanese Buddhist life. A Tendai foundation in the Kantō region in the late thirteenth century belongs to the period in which the school's influence had spread eastward with the shogunate.

What Stands There Today

Tennō-ji stands in Yanaka, a neighbourhood of Taitō ward that survived both the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923 and the firebombing of Tokyo in 1945 better than much of the surrounding city, and which is consequently known for its dense cluster of temples, its cemetery, and its narrow lanes. The temple is one of the seven sites on the Yanaka Seven Lucky Gods route, a pilgrimage (七福神巡り, しちふくじんめぐり, shichifukujin-meguri) in which visitors collect seal stamps at each stop. The circuit is traditionally walked in the first days of the New Year.

The Name in Japanese

The temple's name is written 天王寺 and read てんのうじ in kana; in romaji it is Tennō-ji. The long vowel in the middle is the reason for the macron: the name is not "Tenno-ji" with a short o but Tennō-ji, with the second syllable held for two beats.

Broken down character by character:

• 天 — read てん (ten) in this word. Meaning: heaven, sky. It is one of the most common elements in Japanese temple and shrine names, and appears in such well-known names as 天満宮 (Tenmangū) and 天皇 (tennō, emperor).
• 王 — read のう (nō) in this word. Meaning: king, ruler. On its own the character is read おう (ō); inside this compound it is voiced and lengthened to のう. The combination 天王 (tennō) means "heavenly king" — a guardian deity in Buddhist cosmology, and the same characters used, with a different sense, for the title of the emperor.
• 寺 — read じ (ji) in this word. Meaning: temple, specifically a Buddhist temple. The same character appears in 浅草寺 (Sensō-ji) and 東大寺 (Tōdai-ji). Its Sino-Japanese reading is じ or し; the native Japanese word for a Buddhist temple is てら (tera), which is why so many temple names end in -ji or -dera.

So the name means, roughly, "Heavenly King Temple". The reading is a useful one to memorise, because 寺 as -ji is one of the most productive endings in Japanese place and building names, and because the shift from おう to のう inside a compound is a regular pattern rather than an irregularity: the same voicing and lengthening appears in words like 観音 (kannon) and 因幡 (Inaba).

Visiting and Context

Yanaka is served by Nippori Station on the Yamanote line and by Nezu Station on the Chiyoda line, both a short walk from the temple's surroundings. The neighbourhood is compact enough to cover on foot, and Tennō-ji is best understood as one stop on a walk rather than a destination in itself: the Yanaka cemetery, the shopping street at Yanaka Ginza, and the neighbouring temples of the seven-god circuit together make up the reason people come. Visitors collecting the seven seals should note that the circuit is a New Year custom and that stamp hours at the individual temples vary.

For readers of Japanese, the neighbourhood is a good place to practise reading temple signage: the vocabulary of 寺, 院 (in, cloister), 門 (mon, gate) and 堂 (dō, hall) recurs constantly, and the names are short enough to decode character by character. Tennō-ji itself offers a compact lesson in how Japanese temple names are built — a doctrinal term in Chinese characters, a Buddhist suffix, and a reading that has to be learned as a whole.