Zuisen-ji Temple

Overview

Zuisen-ji (瑞泉寺) is a Buddhist temple of the Rinzai sect in Kamakura, Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan. It stands in Nikaidō, at the head of a narrow valley called Momijigayatsu (紅葉ヶ谷), the Valley of the Autumn Leaves. The temple was founded in 1327, the second year of the Karyaku era, during the Kamakura period.

Its founding abbot and designer was Musō Soseki, the Zen monk, poet and garden designer also known as Musō Kokushi. The temple sits on top of an isolated hill, and it is famous both for its garden and for its Zen rock garden. The abundance and variety of its plants earned it, since antiquity, the nickname "Temple of Flowers" (花の寺). Its main object of worship is Jizō Bosatsu.

Zuisen-ji is designated an Historic Site. It holds numerous objects classified as Important Cultural Properties and Places of Scenic Beauty, and it belongs to three Kamakura pilgrimage circuits: the 33 Sacred Sites of Kannon, the Ten Temples, and the 24 Jizō Reijō.

History

Zuisen-ji was founded in 1327, in the final decades of the Kamakura period. The Kamakura period ran from 1185 to 1333, so the temple was established only six years before the period ended and the shogunate that defined it fell.

The founder, Musō Soseki, was one of the most prominent Zen religious figures of his age, and also a poet and a designer of Zen gardens. At Zuisen-ji he laid out the grounds on an isolated hill in the Momijigayatsu valley, and the garden he made there survives as one of the temple's defining features.

During the Muromachi period, Zuisen-ji served as the family temple of the Ashikaga rulers of Kamakura, the officials known as the Kantō kubō (関東公方). Four of the five kubō are buried at the temple, in a private cemetery that is closed to the public. The burial place of the first kubō, Ashikaga Motouji, is also known by the name Zuisen-ji-den (瑞泉寺殿).

What Stands There Today

The temple occupies the top of an isolated hill at the head of the Momijigayatsu valley. Its two gardens are the centre of its reputation: a garden and a Zen rock garden, both attributed to Musō Soseki's design.

The plantings are dense and varied enough that the temple has carried the nickname "Temple of Flowers" since antiquity. The main object of worship, Jizō Bosatsu, remains enshrined there.

Zuisen-ji is an Historic Site. It contains numerous objects classified as Important Cultural Properties and Places of Scenic Beauty. The private cemetery of the Ashikaga kubō lies on the grounds and is closed to the public.

The Name in Japanese

The temple's name is written 瑞泉寺. It is read ずいせんじ in kana, and rendered in romaji as Zuisen-ji.

The name breaks into three kanji:

• 瑞 — read zui here. It means "auspicious", "blessed" or "felicitous" — the sense of a good omen.
• 泉 — read sen here. It means "spring" or "fountain", a welling source of water.
• 寺 — read ji here. It means "temple", and it is the standard suffix on the name of a Buddhist temple in Japan.

Together the first two characters, 瑞泉, give "auspicious spring" — a blessed or fortunate welling of water. The final character marks the building as a temple. Note that 寺 changes reading depending on the name it follows: here it is ji, while in names such as 東大寺 it is read ji as well, but in others it appears as tera. The reading of a temple's name is fixed by tradition, not by rule, so it is worth learning each one as a whole word.

The temple also carries a mountain name, or sangō (山号), a title prefixed to temple names in the Zen tradition: Kinbyōzan (錦屏山), "Mountain of the Brocade Screen". And the valley it occupies supplies another name in the same spirit: Momijigayatsu (紅葉ヶ谷), the Valley of the Autumn Leaves.

Visiting and Context

Zuisen-ji lies in Nikaidō, in Kamakura, at coordinates roughly 35.33° north, 139.58° east. It is one of the city's quieter temple sites, reached at the end of a valley rather than on the main approach routes.

For readers of Japanese, the temple's name is a compact lesson in how temple names work. The suffix 寺 appears on temple names throughout the country, and its reading shifts between ji and tera from one temple to the next. The prefix 山, meaning "mountain", appears in the sangō that Zen temples carry — Kinbyōzan here — even when, as at Zuisen-ji, the temple stands on a hill rather than a mountain.

Zuisen-ji is enrolled in three separate Kamakura pilgrimage circuits: the 33 Sacred Sites of Kannon, the Ten Temples, and the 24 Jizō Reijō. These circuits are numbered routes, and temples on them are visited in sequence by pilgrims. The temple's inclusion in all three reflects its standing among the Zen temples of Kamakura, and its main image, Jizō Bosatsu, ties it to the Jizō circuit in particular.