Daihoji Temple

Daihoji stands at 579 metres among the mountains of Kumakogen, in grounds thick with old trees. It is the forty-fourth of the eighty-eight temples of the Shikoku pilgrimage, and the exact middle of the circuit, which is why pilgrims call it the halfway temple. Its main image is the eleven-headed Kannon.

The stretch that leads to it is one of the hard ones: about 80 kilometres from the temple before it, over passes, and more than twenty hours of walking.

History

The story begins with a monk from Baekje, in what is now Korea, who carried an image of the eleven-headed Kannon into these mountains and left it there.

It was found long afterwards, in 701, by two hunter brothers from Aki, who came upon it in the sedge grass and built a hut to house it. Word reached the emperor Monmu, who ordered a temple built on the spot and named it after the era then running.

Kobo Daishi, the monk who founded the Shingon school, came about 120 years later, in 822. He performed esoteric rites here, fixed the temple as the middle station of the Shikoku circuit, and moved it from the Tendai school to the Shingon.

Fire destroyed the temple, every hall of it, in 1152. What rebuilt it was an illness: the retired emperor Go-Shirakawa prayed here for his recovery, and when he was well again he paid for the halls, appointed his younger sister as head of the temple and made it an imperial place of prayer. He also gave the temple a board inscribed in his own hand with Sugoazan, the mountain name that Japanese temples carry in front of their own, and it is still kept there. At its height 48 lesser halls stood on the mountain.

It burned again in the wars of the late sixteenth century and was restored by the lord of Matsuyama, and it became a prayer temple of that house. A third fire took it in 1874.

In the grounds

A gilt bronze figure of Kannon was dug out of the mountain in 1934. It had been buried at the root of a tree of perhaps a thousand years, under about 130 stones, each carrying a single character of the Lotus Sutra.

There is also a mound raised for the poet Basho, put up when the service was held for the thirty-third anniversary of his death.