Kiyomizu-dera

Kiyomizu-dera is said to have begun in 778. A monk named Kenshin, later called Enchin, was training in Nara when a dream led him north. On Mt. Otowa he met a hermit named Gyoei Koji. Kenshin found a clear spring welling up on the mountain, Later Sakanoue no Tamuramaro came to the mountain hunting deer, met Kenshin and, together with his wife Miyoshi no Takako, worked to build the temple and enshrine an eleven-headed, thousand-armed Kannon as its main image. The Otowa Waterfall is said to be the spring Kenshin found, still flowing today. The temple was opened partway up the mountain, and about 1,250 years have passed since.

The present main hall and its stage were rebuilt in 1633. Only the main hall is designated a National Treasure, and it is built in the kake-zukuri method, in which pillars are assembled up the slope of the mountain to carry a raised floor. It has a hip roof of cypress bark, with skirt roofs on the east, west, and north sides, and the stage projects from the front. Eighteen pillars stand beneath the stage, made of zelkova more than 400 years old. The timbers are joined with interlocking joints, and not a single nail is used. The stage is about 13 meters high and has a floor area of about 200 square meters. Looking up from below, you can judge how large the framework is that juts out over the slope. The hall measures nine bays by seven and is a single-story building of the early Edo period.

Do not stop at the view from the stage; go around to the underside at least once and look at how the pillars are joined. The same building looks entirely different from the stage looking down on Kyoto and from the slope looking up at the timber frame. The precinct sits partway up Mt. Otowa, part of the Higashiyama range. The National Treasure main hall has wing corridors on both sides of the front stage and another on its west side. Besides the stage, try to see the overlapping roofs and the wing corridors as one outline from a little distance.

The main image, the eleven-headed, thousand-armed Kannon, is affectionately called Kiyomizu Kannon-san. In 1994 Kiyomizu-dera was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List as one of the Historic Monuments of Ancient Kyoto. Sanjusangen-do is in the same ward, Higashiyama, so the two are easy to think of as a pair. Kiyomizu-dera is on a mountain slope, however, so expect slopes and stone steps. Allow time and walk the main hall, the stage, and the Otowa Waterfall in that order, as if tracing the temple's origins; the founding legend and the present architecture then read as one story.