Iwayaji Temple

Iwayaji is the forty-fifth temple of the Shikoku pilgrimage, in the mountains of Kumakogen, at about 700 metres. It stands among cliffs of conglomerate rock riddled with caves, and the buildings are fitted into what space there is between them. The grounds are a National Place of Scenic Beauty.

By the temple's account, Kobo Daishi, the monk who founded the Shingon school and whose travels the pilgrimage follows, came here in 815 looking for a holy place and met a woman from Tosa known as the Lotus hermit, who had been practising on the mountain. Deeply moved by his practice, she entrusted the mountain to him, and died soon after.

He carved two images of Fudo Myoo, one in wood and one in stone. The wooden one went into the main hall; the stone one was sealed in a cave and is never shown. Then he declared the mountain itself to be the image, which is the temple's founding idea and the reason the buildings sit where they do.

Ippen, who founded the Ji school of Pure Land Buddhism and spent his life walking the country and preaching, shut himself up here to practise in the thirteenth century. A painted scroll of his life, made after his death and now a National Treasure, includes a scene of this temple, so it can be seen as it stood in his day.

The buildings

A fire in 1898 took almost everything except the gate and the Kokuzo hall of 1747.

The main hall was rebuilt in 1927. It is smaller than the Daishido hall, which is unusual for a pilgrimage temple, and it is built hard against the great rock behind it, as the founding story requires. The image inside is never shown, and a fire ritual is held before it on the twenty-eighth of each month.

The Daishido was finished in 1920, designed by Kawaguchi Shoichi, an Ehime man who was then working as a technician on the building of the National Diet in Tokyo. It is a temple building in the traditional manner, but the pillars of its front canopy swell in the middle in the Greek manner and carry roses and braidwork at the top. It was made an Important Cultural Property in 2007.

Caves

Monks used the caves in the cliffs for retreats. The one beside the main hall, where the Lotus hermit is said to have lived, is reached by ladder and looks out over the whole precinct. In another, higher up, sits an image of Amida that nobody can account for; it appears on pilgrims' maps of the early Edo period. Below the main hall a cave more than ten metres deep holds stone figures of Jizo, Fudo and Kobo Daishi.

Behind the Daishido a mountain path leads to the inner sanctuary. It passes through a cleft that splits a huge rock, then up a cliff by chains and ladders to a shrine at the top, with the peaks of Shikoku spread out beyond.