is a sub-temple of

Daitoku-ji is a Rinzai school Zen Buddhist temple in the Murasakino neighborhood of Kita-ku in the city of Kyoto Japan. Its ('' sangō'') is . The Daitoku-ji temple complex is one of the largest Zen temples in Kyoto, covering more than . In addition to ...

Kyoto Kyoto ( or ; Japanese language, Japanese: , ''Kyōto'' ), officially , is the capital city of Kyoto Prefecture in the Kansai region of Japan's largest and most populous island of Honshu. , the city had a population of 1.46 million, making it t ...

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 ...

. It was founded by

Toyotomi Hideyoshi , otherwise known as and , was a Japanese samurai and ''daimyō'' (feudal lord) of the late Sengoku period, Sengoku and Azuchi-Momoyama periods and regarded as the second "Great Unifier" of Japan.Richard Holmes, The World Atlas of Warfare: ...

in 1582 as the mortuary temple of

Oda Nobunaga was a Japanese ''daimyō'' and one of the leading figures of the Sengoku period, Sengoku and Azuchi-Momoyama periods. He was the and regarded as the first "Great Unifier" of Japan. He is sometimes referred as the "Demon Daimyō" and "Demo ...

. Hideyoshi granted the temple three hundred

koku The is a Chinese-based Japanese unit of volume. One koku is equivalent to 10 or approximately , or about of rice. It converts, in turn, to 100 shō and 1,000 gō. One ''gō'' is the traditional volume of a single serving of rice (before co ...

and staged his celebrated Daitoku-ji tea gathering on its grounds in 1585. During the early years of the

Meiji period The was an era of Japanese history that extended from October 23, 1868, to July 30, 1912. The Meiji era was the first half of the Empire of Japan, when the Japanese people moved from being an isolated feudal society at risk of colonizatio ...

its precinct was demolished and its treasures relocated; Sōken-in was revived in 1926. The seated wooden statue of Oda Nobunaga of 1583,

lacquer Lacquer is a type of hard and usually shiny coating or finish applied to materials such as wood or metal. It is most often made from resin extracted from trees and waxes and has been in use since antiquity. Asian lacquerware, which may be c ...

ed, with inlaid eyes and an inscription on the base, an Important Cultural Property, was returned in 1961. Nobunaga's funeral and Hideyoshi's foundation of the sub-temple 'with the very best wood available, a remarkable thing to see' was recounted by the Portuguese missionary

Luís Fróis Luís Fróis (1532 – 8 July 1597) was a Portuguese Catholic priest and missionary who worked in Asia, most notably Japan, during the second half of the 16th century. As a Jesuit, he preached in Japan during the Sengoku period, meeting with O ...

in his contemporary ''História de Japam''.

References

Buddhist temples in Kyoto Daitoku-ji temples Daitoku-ji {{Japan-Buddhist-temple-stub

See also

References