Discover

, also called 'Kennen-ji', is a historic Zen Buddhist temple at 584 Komatsu-cho, Higashiyama-ku, near Gion in Kyoto, Japan. Founded in 1202, it is the first Zen temple in Japan.
The monk Eisai, credited with introducing Zen to Japan, served as Kennin-ji's founding abbot and is buried on the temple grounds. For its first years the temple combined Zen, Tendai, and Shingon practices, but it became a purely Zen institution under the eleventh abbot, (1213-1278). The Zen master Dōgen, later founder of the Japanese Soto sect, trained at Kennin-ji. It is one of the Rinzai sect's headquarter temples.
When first built, the temple contained seven principal buildings. It has suffered from fires through the centuries, and was rebuilt in the mid-thirteenth century by Zen master (1202-1280), and again in the sixteenth century with donations of buildings from nearby temples and Tōfuku-ji.
Today Kennin-ji's buildings include the Abbot’s Quarters (Hōjō), given by Ankoku-ji in 1599; the Dharma Hall (Hatto), built in 1765; a tea house built in 1587 to designs by tea master Sen no Rikyū for Toyotomi Hideyoshi; and the Imperial Messenger Gate (Chokushimon), said to date from the Kamakura era (1185–1333), and still showing marks from arrows. It also has fourteen subtemples on the Kennin-ji precincts and about seventy associated temples throughout Japan.
Kennin-ji contains notable paintings by Tawaraya Sōtatsu, Tamura Soryu and (1883-1945), as well as a remarkable ceiling painting of two dragons by (1924-), created in 2002 for the temple's 800th anniversary.

Contents

External links

References

External links

★ Kennin-ji official page (Japanese language)

★ Kenninji English-language information

References

★ ''Kennin-ji: The Oldest Zen Temple in Kyoto'', undated brochure from temple