Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Sōji-ji
Summary
is one of two daihonzan of the Sōtō school of Zen Buddhism. The other is Eihei-ji temple in Fukui Prefecture. Fodor's calls it "one of the largest and busiest Buddhist institutions in Japan". The temple was founded in 740 as a Shingon Buddhist temple. Keizan, later known as Sōtō's great patriarch Taiso Jōsai Daishi, founded the present temple in 1321, when he renamed it Sōji-ji with the help and patronage of Emperor Go-Daigo. The temple has about twelve buildings in Tsurumi, part of the port city of Yokohama, one designed by the architect Itō Chūta.
Giving it the name Morooka-dera circa 740, Gyōki (668–749) founded the temple as a Shingon Buddhist temple in Noto, a peninsula on Honshu, Japan's largest island. At that time, the temple was a small chapel within the precincts of a larger Shinto shrine called Morooka Hiko Jinja. By 1296, the temple had grown enough to support a full-time priest and a master ajari named Jōken was assigned there.
The Shrine was relocated 1321 to a new estate and Jōken went with it. Jōken entrusted the former temple to Keizan, who then changed the temple from Shingon to a Sōtō temple named Shogakuzan Sōji-ji (ji means Buddhist temple in Japanese). The first official abbot, Gasan, was installed months later. However, the original Buddhist deity enshrined, Kannon Bodhisattva, was still enshrined in the temple, and for a time esoteric rituals were still carried out for the temple's patrons. Because Keizan had originally previously founded another temple, Yōkōji, a complicated rivalry existed between the two temples, leading to open conflict during the Tokugawa period, with Sōji-ji gradually replacing Yōkōji as the head temple of Keizan and the lineage of Gikai. This ascension of Sōji-ji happened in part due to its efforts to send monks out into the countryside, and over generations these monks would often convert small, village chapels (nominally Tendai or Shingon) into full-time temples, which in turn helped Sōji-ji's network grow.
The temple was totally destroyed by fire in 1898.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.