Sunday Early Morning Zen Meditation at Enkouji

Before you go

In 1601, Tokugawa Ieyasu founded Enkouji in Fushimi as a school. He invited Sanyo Genkitsu, the ninth head of the Ashikaga School in Shimotsuke, to run it, and the school admitted monks and laypeople alike.

The school printed many books, including the Kongzi Jiayu and the Zhenguan Zhengyao, known as Fushimi editions or Enkouji editions. The wooden type used for the printing survives; the temple says the roughly 50,000 pieces are the oldest wooden movable type in Japan, and they are an Important Cultural Property.

The temple says that after the Meiji period, Enkouji was for a time Japan's only training monastery for nuns, and the Zen hall from those days survives. The Sunday early-morning meditation meetings are held in that hall, in four parts: sitting meditation, work practice, a Dharma talk, and a rice-gruel sitting.

Sitting meditation stresses the unity of body and mind: focus on the breath, calm the mind, look deeply into oneself, and move toward a state of "nothingness." After sitting comes work practice, weeding and sweeping the grounds; the temple calls sitting "practice in stillness" and work "practice in motion," and treats both as equally important.

The Dharma talk takes place in the Zuiun-kaku hall, given by the head priest, and visitors are shown actual pieces of Enkouji-edition wooden type. Last comes the rice-gruel sitting, the Zen monastery's breakfast of gruel and pickles; before eating, participants reflect on how much labour went into the bowl and where it came from, then eat in silence.

The temple holds more besides: its main image, a seated Thousand-Armed Kannon said to be by Unkei, and Maruyama Okyo's screen "Bamboo in Wind and Rain." Inside the gate are the dry landscape garden "Honryu-tei" and the "Ten Oxen Garden," along with Seiryu Pond, said to be the oldest pond in northern Kyoto, and on the hill behind stands a Toshogu shrine to Tokugawa Ieyasu.

Booking

A reservation is required, by telephone only: call 075-781-8025 by 17:00 on the previous day (phone hours 09:00 to 17:00). Groups of 20 or more arrange a separate date and time.