Sunday, October 19, 2008

Ryoutanji - Okuyama Hansobo

I live in a place in Japan that I don't want to tell a lot of people about, for fear that they'll all want to come down and live here! It's a good place to be, though, because you're not caught up in the concrete neon swirls of the huge big cities and neither are you sticking out like a sore thumb in a small community where everyone knows your business.

Shizuoka "Ken", the county or state (actually a prefecture), lies halfway between Tokyo and Osaka and has a lovely mild climate. We grow oranges. It seldom snows -- the high mountains to the west block all the Siberian onslaughts and we end up with "kara-kaze" or the empty winds and clear blue skies throughout the winter.

We lie between these mountains and the Pacific Ocean with one of the largest lakes in Japan, in truth a lagoon since it is open to the sea, just to the west.

Northwest of our city and a short distance above the northern tip of the lake stand two quite amazing and reasonably ancient temples, pictures of which you will see below. Ryoutanji is the less famous of the two, although considerably older. It is rather hard to find unless you know exactly where you are going. The larger temple, the Hansobo, is a Zen temple with some heavy connections to the old Imperial family of about 500 years ago (one of the old Emperors, supposedly, retired here as a monk). The buildings we can see today date from the early 17th and 18th centuries, by Western reckoning, with a number of new buildings at Hansobo since it has many wealthy modern patrons. The temple sites themselves are much older than the present structures.

Basically, the first three pictures you will see below are of Ryoutanji, and all the others come from Okuyama Hansobo, starting with some weird little jokers, the "O-jizo-sama" about 500 in number, little stone statues, some of them with bibs and hats (said to commemorate dead babies), but with these Zen guys you never know when they are taking the piss, that lie scattered around among the rocks along the very steep slope up to the temple compound.

Ryoutanji: just inside the entrance gate

Ryoutanji: the graveyard (these are memorials with no bodies beneath!)

Ryoutanji: look at the strange almost Polynesian roof beams on the temple to the left!

Hansobo: one jizo with a bib, and a reflective chap without one.

Hansobo: bloke on right is praying away.

Hansobo: just inside the first compound.


Hansobo: around the back of the Main Hall where there is a garden.

Hansobo: a view of the roofs from higher ground. Check out the pagoda among the trees on the far left of the picture: this was built by a patron back in the 1920s.

Hansobo: the Old Boy himself, but a modern rendering.

Hansobo: Six Boddhisattvas all in a row.

Hansobo: a rock garden halfway up a stairway to a higher level


Hansobo: the Boddhi Boys from above.

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