is a Jōdo shū

Buddhist temple A Buddhist temple or Buddhist monastery is the place of worship for Buddhism, Buddhists, the followers of Buddhism. They include the structures called vihara, chaitya, stupa, wat, khurul and pagoda in different regions and languages. Temples in B ...

Kamakura , officially , is a city of Kanagawa Prefecture in Japan. It is located in the Kanto region on the island of Honshu. The city has an estimated population of 172,929 (1 September 2020) and a population density of 4,359 people per km2 over the tota ...

Kanagawa is a Prefectures of Japan, prefecture of Japan located in the Kantō region of Honshu. Kanagawa Prefecture is the List of Japanese prefectures by population, second-most populous prefecture of Japan at 9,221,129 (1 April 2022) and third-dens ...

Japan Japan is an island country in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean off the northeast coast of the Asia, Asian mainland, it is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan and extends from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea ...

. Famous for its

rhododendrons ''Rhododendron'' (; : ''rhododendra'') is a very large genus of about 1,024 species of woody plants in the heath family (Ericaceae). They can be either evergreen or deciduous. Most species are native to eastern Asia and the Himalayan region, b ...

, it was named after its founder's (great historical figure

Hōjō Masako was a Japanese politician who exercised significant power in the early years of the Kamakura period, which was reflected by her contemporary sobriquet of the "nun shogun". She was the wife of Minamoto no Yoritomo, and mother of Minamoto no Yori ...

)

posthumous name A posthumous name is an honorary Personal name, name given mainly to revered dead people in East Asian cultural sphere, East Asian culture. It is predominantly used in Asian countries such as China, Korea, Vietnam, Japan, Malaysia and Thailand. ...

. The main object of worship is

Amida Nyorai Amida can mean : Places and jurisdictions * Amida (Mesopotamia), now Diyarbakır, an ancient city in Asian Turkey; it is (nominal) seat of: ** The Chaldean Catholic Archeparchy of Amida ** The Latin titular Metropolitan see of Amida of the Ro ...

,Japanese Wikipedia but it also enshrines Senju

Kannon Guanyin () is a common Chinese name of the bodhisattva associated with Karuṇā, compassion known as Avalokiteśvara (). Guanyin is short for Guanshiyin, which means " he One WhoPerceives the Sounds of the World". Originally regarded as m ...

, Goddess of Mercy. An’yō-in is Number three of the 33 temples of the

Bandō Sanjūsankasho The ("The Bandō 33 Kannon Pilgrimage") is a series of 33 Buddhist temples in Eastern Japan sacred to Kannon. Bandō is the old name for what is now the Kantō region,Donald Richie used in this case because the temples are all in the Prefecture ...

pilgrimage circuit.

History

This temple has a complex history and is the result of the fusion of three separate temples called Chōraku-ji, Zendō-ji and Tashiro-ji. It was first opened in 1225 as Chōraku-ji in Hase Sasamegayatsu by Hōjō Masako for her defunct husband

Minamoto no Yoritomo was the founder and the first shogun of the Kamakura shogunate, ruling from 1192 until 1199, also the first ruling shogun in the history of Japan.Nussbaum, Louis-Frédéric. (2005). "Minamoto no Yoriie" in . He was the husband of Hōjō Masako ...

, founder of the

Kamakura shogunate The was the feudal military government of Japan during the Kamakura period from 1185 to 1333. Nussbaum, Louis-Frédéric. (2005)"''Kamakura-jidai''"in ''Japan Encyclopedia'', p. 459. The Kamakura shogunate was established by Minamoto no Yori ...

.An'yō-in At the time it was a Ritsu sect temple. After being burned to the ground by

Nitta Yoshisada also known as Minamoto no Yoshisada was a samurai lord of the Nanboku-chō period Japan. He was the head of the Nitta clan in the early fourteenth century, and supported the Southern Court of Emperor Go-Daigo in the Nanboku-chō period. He famo ...

's soldiery in 1333 at the fall of the

, it was fused with Zendō-ji, moved to this spot and renamed, but it burned again in 1680. It was then once more rebuilt and a Senju Kannon (Thousand-armed Goddess of Mercy) was transferred to it from Tashiro-ji in Hikigayatsu.

Points of interest

The great Chinese black pine in the garden is over 700 years old. Behind the temple there are two ''

hōkyōintō A is a type of tō, Japanese pagoda, so called because it originally contained the sūtraIwanami Kōjien Japanese dictionary (or ).Iwanami Kōjien Japanese dictionary A Chinese variant of the Indian stupa, it was originally conceived as a ceno ...

''. The smallest is one of Masako's possible graves. The other is the oldest ''hōkyōintō'' in Kamakura and a nationally designated Important Cultural Property. In the temple's small cemetery down the alley in front of the temple's gate rests famous film director

Akira Kurosawa was a Japanese filmmaker who List of works by Akira Kurosawa, directed 30 feature films in a career spanning six decades. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers in the History of film, history of cinema ...

.Ozu Yasujiro

Notes

References

Anyoin
* Article "An'yō-in", Japanese Wikipedia, accessed in April 2008

External links

{{DEFAULTSORT:An'yo-in (Kamakura) Buddhist temples in Kamakura, Kanagawa Pure Land temples Jōdo-shū temples