Myoshin-ji

Myoshin-ji

Myōshin-ji is like a small temple town, where forty-six sub-temples are connected by stone-paved paths. Let us visit one of them now: Taizō-in.

Perhaps because it is only one of many sub-temples, its gate is not particularly large. Let us walk toward the hōjō.

The garden is said to have been designed by Kanō Motonobu, an early master of the Kanō school and the son of its founder, Kanō Masanobu.

Looking into the hōjō of Taizō-in from the veranda, we see the Buddhist altar standing at the center. In the corners of the sliding doors opened on either side, bamboo leaves buried beneath snow emerge from the shadows.

This is part of White Heron on the Willow in the Snow, from The Paintings of Five Rings: the Room of Emptiness, created by the artist Yuki Murabayashi.

Before her work was installed, the room displayed sliding-door paintings created some four hundred years ago by the Kanō-school painter Kanō Ryōkei.