Jōjakkōji Temple

This guide to Jojakkoji Temple in Kyoto opens in 1595, when Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the most powerful man in Japan, summoned every Buddhist sect in the city to a mass funeral chant, and one priest, Nisshin, refused to go. It traces what his sect's uncompromising rules demanded of him, and follows him as he left his old temple and climbed Mount Ogura to build a hermitage on ground once kept by the poet Fujiwara no Teika. You'll hear how the site got its name, the land of eternal, tranquil light. Stand among the maples that blaze red each autumn on the hillside he chose.