Thirteen Buddhist Sites of Kyoto

Overview

The Thirteen Buddhist Sites of Kyoto (京都十三仏霊場, Kyōto jūsan butsu reijō) is a pilgrimage circuit of thirteen Buddhist temples in Kyoto, Japan. The circuit was established on 18 September 1981, in the 56th year of the Shōwa era (昭和, Shōwa, 1926–1989). Its headquarters is Chishaku-in Temple, which also appears among the member temples.

The circuit belongs to the older Japanese tradition of reijō (霊場, reijō) — sacred sites organised into a numbered route that pilgrims visit in sequence. The majority of the thirteen temples are associated with Shingon Buddhism, the Japanese form of esoteric Buddhism founded in the ninth century, and with the Rinzai school of Zen.

History

The Thirteen Buddhist Sites of Kyoto was founded on 18 September 1981. By that date the Shōwa era had been running for 56 years, and the circuit was registered as a Shōwa 56 foundation. Chishaku-in Temple was designated its headquarters, giving the circuit an administrative centre as well as a devotional one.

The circuit was assembled from temples that were, for the most part, already long established in Kyoto. Tō-ji Temple and Ninna-ji Temple are both major Shingon foundations with roots in the early Heian period. Sennyū-ji Temple served for centuries as the burial temple of the imperial family. Byōdō-ji, Daihōon-ji, Hōrin-ji, Hōkongō-in, Zuishin-in, Daikōmyō-ji, Seiryō-ji and Kaikō-ji complete the group of member temples, alongside Chishaku-in itself.

The grouping follows a pattern common in Japanese religion: an older set of temples is reorganised into a single named route, with each stop assigned one of the Thirteen Buddhas. The Thirteen Buddhas (十三仏, jūsan butsu) are a set of thirteen figures — Buddhas and bodhisattvas — associated in Japanese funerary custom with the thirteen memorial services held after a death. A reijō dedicated to them ties the pilgrimage route to that cycle of observances.

What Stands There Today

The thirteen member temples remain the substance of the circuit. They are:

• Byōdō-ji Temple
• Chishaku-in Temple — the headquarters
• Tō-ji Temple
• Ninna-ji Temple
• Daihōon-ji Temple
• Hōrin-ji Temple
• Hōkongō-in Temple
• Zuishin-in Temple
• Sennyū-ji Temple
• Daikōmyō-ji Temple
• Seiryō-ji Temple
• Kaikō-ji Temple

The circuit is also documented through a further set of temples recorded as associated with it: Chishaku-in, Tō-ji, Ninna-ji, Daihōon-ji, Hōkan-ji, Hōkongō-in, Sennyū-ji, Daikōmyō-ji and Kaikō-ji. Hōkan-ji appears in this associated list but not among the thirteen members.

The temples are spread across Kyoto rather than clustered in one district, so the route as a whole covers a wide span of the city. Several of the sites are large, well-known foundations with extensive grounds; others are smaller and quieter.

The Name in Japanese

The full Japanese name is 京都十三仏霊場. It is read きょうとじゅうさんぶつれいじょう in kana, and written Kyōto jūsan butsu reijō in romaji.

Breaking it down character by character:

京 — read kyō here. It means "capital". The character depicts a raised mound or hill, and came to denote a capital city.

都 — read to here. It means "metropolis" or "capital city". Together, 京都 (Kyōto) is the city's name, written with the characters for "capital" and "metropolis" — a fitting pair for a city that served as the seat of the imperial court for over a thousand years.

十 — read jū. It means "ten". It is a simple crossing shape, one vertical stroke crossed by one horizontal.

三 — read san. It means "three". Three horizontal strokes, the middle one shortest.

十三 — read together as jūsan, "thirteen". Japanese builds the teens by putting the unit after the ten: ten plus three.

仏 — read butsu here. It means "Buddha" or "buddhist". The character has a person radical on the left and a phonetic element on the right. In compounds it can refer to a Buddha, to Buddhism generally, or to a Buddhist image.

霊 — read rei here. It means "spirit", "soul" or "sacred". It carries the sense of something numinous or spiritually charged.

場 — read jō here. It means "place", "site" or "ground". The character combines a soil radical with a phonetic element.

霊場 — read together as reijō, "sacred site" or "sacred ground". This is the standard Japanese term for a holy place, and it is the word used across Japan for pilgrimage circuits: a reijō is a site where the sacred is understood to be present.

So the whole name means, plainly, "the thirteen-Buddha sacred sites of Kyoto". The name tells the reader three things at once: the city, the number of stops, and the devotional focus of the route.

Visiting and Context

The circuit is a reijō, not a single building, so there is no one address to visit. Pilgrims move from temple to temple, and the thirteen stops are distributed across Kyoto. Chishaku-in Temple, as headquarters, is the natural starting point for anyone wanting to understand how the circuit is organised.

The route sits within the wider landscape of Japanese pilgrimage. Kyoto holds several numbered circuits of this kind, and the practice of visiting a set of temples in order — collecting a mark or seal at each — is centuries old. The Thirteen Buddhist Sites of Kyoto is a modern addition to that tradition, founded in 1981, but it draws its thirteen temples from a stock of foundations that in several cases predate it by many hundreds of years.

For a student of Japanese, the name itself is a compact lesson. It contains the city's name, the numbers ten and three, the word for Buddha, and the word for a sacred site — vocabulary that recurs constantly in the names of temples, routes and religious places throughout Japan.