Jyoei-ji Temple & the Shigemori Garden

 

Jyoei-ji Temple in Yamaguchi City is a Rinzai temple more commonly known as Sesshuteien after the garden designed by Sesshu within its grounds.

A statue of Sesshu, one of the most important artists and garden designers in Japanese history as well as being a zen monk, stands at the entrance to the temple.

On the approach you pass through Muin, a wide, fairly simple garden created in 2012. photos above and below. This is the first of 4 gardens at the temple.

None of the current buildings are very old, but it is quite a big temple with many smaller halls within the grounds.

The temple also has some nice art...

However, the main focus of the temple is the huge garden to the rear which is the biggest garden designed by Sesshu and said to be based on one of his landscape paintings....

I was here at the start of day 23 of my walk along the Chugoku Pilgrimage and it was peak Autumn Colours time so I highly recommend my post from last year of 24 shots of the Sesshu Garden in glorious colours.

For this post I will concetrate on the garden in front of the main hall.

It was designed by Mirei Shigemori.

It is called Nanmeitei garden and was built in 1968.

There is a story that the head priest asked Shigemori to make a garden that was not so good so that it did not detract from the Sesshu Garden.

The garden uses the two gates as a backdrop.

Please enjoy these close-up shots of the garden.

The honzon of the temple is a Thousand-armed Kannon.

The final garden is a small karesansui garden using  a reddish gravel rather than the usual white....

I once again urge you to check out the post of the Sesshu Garden in full Autumn Colours.

The previous post in this series was on my walk into Yamaguchi City the previous afternoon.

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The Nine Mountains & Eight Seas Garden and the Mount Horai Pond Garden

 

This is the second post on the gardens at Kanyoji Temple in Yamaguchi.

The previous post looked at the temple and mostly the main garden and purely sand and rock courtyard garden.

This time we are looking at two gardens behind the temple, both quite narrow and they run into each other.

I was fortunate to be here during the peak of the autumn colours.

Kanyoji is a 14th century Rinzai Zen temple that is temple 15 on the Chugoku Kannon Pilgrimage, the reason I was visiting this time.

The running water in all the gardens at Kanyoji comes from Choondo Cave behind the temple. It is actually a man-made tunnel, 89 meters long, which brings water from the river. It was constructed in the 17th century.

The Mount Horai Pond Garden represents Mount Horai, which is the Japanese name for Mount Penglai, a  mountain and home of immortals in Chinese mythology.

The roots would seem to be in Daoism, a major influence on Japanese garden design which would include Crane and Turrtle islands.

Both this and the Nine Mountains garden are said to represent Kamakura Period styles, though the bold spirals on the sand are definitely Mirei Shigemori...

The Nine Mountain and Eight Seas Garden depict the landscape surounding Mount Sumeru, the central stone.

This is very much grounded in Buddhist cosmology, though it does have some Hindu origins.

Mount Sumeru is the centre of the world in Buddhist cosmology, and like Mount Horai, is a common motif in many gardens.

The gardens here at Kanyoji, and the gardens at Matsuo Shrine near Kyoto, are both considered masterworks of Mirei Shigemori.

Both were designed towards the end of his career, and both feature garden designs depicting various historical periods.

Matsu Shrine is obviously more accessible, but Kanyoji would be my favorite in the Autumn colors season.

The previous post in this series on the Chugoku Kannon Pilgrimage was on the other gardens here at Kanyoji.

if you would like to subscribe by email, just leave your email address in the comments below. It will not be published or made public. I post new content almost every day, and send out an email about twice a month with short descriptions and links to the most recent posts.