A story told for over a thousand years
Kiyomizu-dera tells of its own beginnings through a Kiyomizu-dera founding legend that has been retold in temple records, paintings and popular tales. As with many such stories, parts can be checked against historical records and parts cannot. This article gives the traditional account and indicates where it should be treated as tradition rather than established fact.
The temple is traditionally dated to 778, in the Nara period. That date is a few years before Kyoto became the capital in 794, and so the temple is described as older than the city. Historians generally regard the very early history of the site as poorly documented, and a careful reader should treat 778 as the date given by tradition, not as a confirmed record.
The traditional account
The story is usually told like this, though versions differ in detail.
A monk named Enchin (not to be confused with the later Tendai monk of the same name), associated with the Nara temples, was guided to the hills east of what would later be Kyoto, in some accounts by a vision or a golden light. Finding a waterfall on Mount Otowa, he met a hermit named Gyoei who had been practising there for a long time. The hermit explained that he had been waiting for someone to take over his work, gave Enchin a piece of sacred wood, and then went away or disappeared. Enchin is said to have carved an image of Kannon from the wood, and set it in a small hut by the waterfall. This was the beginning of the temple. The waterfall of the legend is the same spring that visitors drink from today, the Otowa waterfall.
The second part of the story concerns a warrior. Sakanoue no Tamuramaro, a historical court general, is said to have come to the mountain while hunting deer, in order to obtain medicine for his sick wife. He met Enchin, who is said to have rebuked him for killing and spoken of compassion. Moved by this, Tamuramaro gave up hunting, became a patron of the hermitage, and donated his own residence for the construction of a hall to house the image.
Tamuramaro was a real person; he lived from 758 to 811 and was a prominent general in the court’s campaigns in the north. His connection to the temple is plausible in the sense that members of the court did support temples, but the details of the hunting story are part of the legend. Many scholars treat the story as a later tale that explains the temple’s patronage.
What can be said with more confidence
Some points stand on firmer ground than the legend’s details:
- The temple has been a major religious site for many centuries, and courtiers and ordinary people alike visited it during the Heian period.
- It has burned and been rebuilt repeatedly. The main hall that visitors see now dates from the seventeenth century, not from the eighth.
- Its principal image is Kannon, and the temple became part of the Saigoku Kannon pilgrimage in later centuries.
The legend’s themes are consistent with these facts: a compassionate bodhisattva, a place of practice by water, a warrior who is turned from violence, and a patron who gives his house. Such themes appear in many temple foundation tales across Asia, and as the spread of Buddhism moved from one region to another, accounts of founding saints and wonder-working images often came with it. A legend can convey what a community believes about itself without being a historical record.
The Hosso school connection
Kiyomizu-dera is traditionally linked with the Hosso school, one of the older schools of Buddhism in Japan. Hosso is the Japanese form of a tradition based on the Yogacara (consciousness-only) teachings, which reached Japan from China. It goes back to the teaching of the Chinese monk Xuanzang, who studied in India; his time of Xuanzang at Nalanda is among the best-known episodes of Buddhist travel. Its main centres were in Nara, such as Kofuku-ji, and Enchin’s association with Nara fits with this.
For many centuries Kiyomizu-dera is generally described as a Hosso temple, and in the twentieth century it became independent, forming a body known as Kita Hosso. The exact historical stages of its affiliations are complex and not fully clear to the casual visitor, so this article simply notes the connection and leaves details to specialists.
Hosso’s reputation is largely scholarly, and much of its focus is on the analysis of the mind. Popular devotion at the temple, meanwhile, centres on Kannon, a form of Kannon devotion shared by many Japanese temples. Both can exist side by side, as is common in Japanese temples: a scholarly lineage in the background and a broad popular devotion in front.
Reading the legend today
Visitors can approach the founding story in different ways. Some take it as a devotional narrative that tells them what the site means to worshippers. Others take it as folklore that reveals how the temple saw itself. Historians read it as evidence of how a temple presented itself to patrons, and as a valuable record of later beliefs, even when its early details cannot be verified.
It is worth keeping an open and respectful attitude. The stories on temple signs and in guidebooks are rarely identical, and versions of names and dates vary. When a source states a date or a detail with great confidence, it is reasonable to ask where it comes from. The temple itself is the best source for its own account, and its current information may differ from what is written here.