Enkōji
Zen temple with a moss garden, koto-toned water chime, and fifty thousand surviving wooden printing blocks.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Enkoji in Kyoto begins with a shrine on the hill behind you holding one of shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu's own teeth, and asks why the man who ended a century and a half of civil war chose next to open a school. It follows the scholar-monk Sanyo Genkitsu, invited in 1601 to found an academy that printed Confucian texts on wooden movable type, some fifty thousand pieces of which still survive on these grounds. You'll hear how the temple later moved to this spot in Ichijoji, decades after Ieyasu's death. Listen for the suikinkutsu near the garden, water dripping into a buried clay chamber and ringing back like a struck koto.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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