This article is based on a visit made on Friday, 18 November 2016.
Rengeo-in (蓮華王院,
Rengeō-in, lit. 'Temple of the Lotus King') is the official name of a particular Buddhist temple in southeastern Kyoto. It is better known, however, as Sanjusangen-do (三十三間堂,
Sanjūsangen-dō, lit. 'thirty-three-span hall'), named after the length of its main hall, measured as 33 spans between pillars. (Its actual length is 120 meters, or 393 feet.) Visitors to the temple may walk through the length of the hall and back around, passing over a thousand gilded Buddhist statues along the way.
Which do you think gets across the length of the building better: the straight angle shot at the top of this article, or this panorama shot here? To view this picture in full size, click
here.
The temple's main claim to fame lies within its halls, and I'll get to that in due time, but there's more to it than that. In the temple grounds, the main hall stands side-by-side with a wide courtyard, in which there are a few landscaped ponds like this.
This is the same pond, from the other side.
The main hall is made of unpainted wood, but other vermillion-hued buildings inject some colour into the complex, such as the outer walls and this bell tower.
Photography is not allowed inside the temple halls, so sadly I do not have my own pictures of its many statues. If you can navigate the temple's website (linked at the end of this article), which is only offered in Japanese, there are a few pictures to give you an idea. On top of that, there are a small number of pictures available from Wikimedia Commons, so I will be using them to illustrate my descriptions.
The central icon of this temple is a giant gilded statue of
Kannon, the Buddhist saint (Boddhisatva) of compassion. Specifically, the variant represented here is the Thousand-Armed Kannon (千手観音,
Senju Kan'non). There is a legend of how Kannon came to possess so many extra arms and heads. She sought to relieve all the suffering in the world and free everybody from the cycle of reincarnation, but her task was too daunting, and her head and arms were shattered into pieces for her efforts. But, thanks to the Buddha, she was then given eleven heads to hear all the cries of suffering, and a thousand arms to help those in need.
The actual number of arms in depictions of the Thousand-Armed Kannon varies; here it is forty-two, including its two original arms. Multiplying the forty extra arms by the 25 planes of existence in Buddhist belief will tally up to a thousand. (Then again, everything I've been able to Google on the subject tells me there are 31 planes of existence, so I don't know... but to be fair,
you try sculpting a statue with a thousand arms.) The figure itself is 3.34 metres (11 feet) tall, and the entire statue, including the base and back pieces, is 7 metres (23 feet) tall.
On either side of the central statue are rows of many smaller, but still life-sized, statues of the Thousand-Armed Kannon. There are five hundred of these on either side. Like their big sister, each of these statues has 42 actual arms.
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| By Nara National Museum 奈良帝室博物館 (Showa 8 - 1933) (1933 奈良帝室博物館 volume on Japanese sculpture) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons |
Complementing the many, many Kannons are statues of 28 other Buddhist deities. They stand in the front rows of all the statues, as if guarding them. For example, the one shown above is
Kissho-ten or Kichijo-ten (吉祥天), the goddess of happiness, beauty, and fertility. She is derived from the Hindu goddess
Lakshmi, as Buddhism itself evolved from Hinduism before spreading from India to China and eventually Japan. She also pulls double-duty as one of the
Seven Lucky Gods of Shinto.
Finally, this is a map of the Keihan train line, which I took at their nearby Shichijo station. The cute archer girl in the lower-right corner represents the
Toshiya (通し矢,
Tōshi-ya, lit. 'target-hitting arrows') archery competition, which I will describe below.
This is an 18th-century ukiyo-e (woodblock print) depiction of the Toshiya, as it was held in the Edo period. Back then, four events were held as part of the Toshiya: 1) the
Hyaku-i (百射, lit. 'one hundred shots'), where archers competed to land the most shots out of 100, 2) the
Sen-i (千射, lit. 'one thousand shots'), the same, but with 1,000 arrows, 3) the
Hiyakazu (日矢数, lit. 'number of arrows in a day'), where archers competed to land the most shots in 12 hours, and 4) the
Oyakazu (大矢数,
Ōyakazu, lit. 'great number of arrows'), the same, but over 24 hours! The standing Oyakazu record was set in 1686, in which the archer fired 13,053 arrows, an average of 9 arrows a minute, and landed 8,133 (62.3%) of them!
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| No machine-readable author provided. Peter 111 assumed (based on copyright claims). [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons |
The Toshiya was officially abandoned in 1861, but it exists in a different form to this very day. In the modern Toshiya, girls from all over the country line up in the courtyard of Sanjusangen-do, and loose arrows at a target 60 metres (197 feet) away. It is held on the second Sunday in January, roughly coinciding with Coming-of-Age Day, a traditional holiday honouring boys and girls who have turned 20 years old. I completely missed the Toshiya festival, but it is worthwhile to visit Sanjusangen-do at any time of the year. A thousand statues is a huge number, and spending so much time just walking past them, in such a quiet atmosphere, is an awe-inspiring experience!
Hours: Open 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM, or 9:00 AM to 4:00 PM from 16 November to 31 March. Admission ends 30 minutes before closing time. No regular closing days.
Costs: ¥600.
Address: 657 Sanjūsangen-dō Mawari, Higashiyama-ku, Kyōto-shi, Kyōto-fu 〒605-0941
Access: From Kyoto Station, take bus #86 (stand D2), #88 (D23), #100 (D1), #110 (D1), #206 (D2), or #208 (D2) and get off at the Hakubutsukan Sanjusangendo-mae stop (10 minutes, ¥230).
Kiyomizu-dera can also be reached on foot in 5 minutes from Shichijo Station, on the Keihan Main line
(KH), or in 20 minutes from Kyoto Station.
Website:
(Japanese)
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