Japan Travel Bureau

Higashi Honganji Temple

 

The Higashi Honganji Temple is very popular in Japan.

It is the headquarters of a sub-sect of the Jodo-Shin-shu(sect) which was founded after Shinran(1173-1262). He was one of the few great priests who started preaching in simpler terms in those days.

So, the Jodo-Shin-shu received much popular support in spite of the repeated oppressions by some other Buddhist denominations.

Eventually it came to gain even the political and military ruler’s patronage at the end of the 16^th century.

Yet, as it grew further influential, the following ruler forced the sect to split into two halves in 1602, when Higashi Honganji was founded at the present site as the head temple of one half of them.

But the temple structures were destroyed by repeated fires.

The present buildings were reconstructed after the fire in the middle of the last century.

v  one of the two main halls is the second largest wooden structure in Japan with 927 tatami(mats) covering most of the floor inside. Enshrined in its altar is a statue of Shinran, the founder of the sect.

v  on the corridor between these two main halls, in a glass case, is a long and thick rope(110m long and 1 metric ton heavy) placed in a coil for exhibition. It is one of the 53 ropes made mainly of the human hair contributed by a great number of female devotees, to be used in the transportation of the heavy timber on sledges from the forests to Kyoto on the occasion of the reconstruction of the temple.

v  the other main hall has a statue of the Buddha Amida(Amitabha in Sanscrit) in its altar. The great priest Shinran insisted that a man is saved only through faith in this particular Buddha of boundless light and infinite life.