Kōsan-ji Temple

This guide to Kosan-ji Temple in Kyoto opens with comic scrolls of animals dressed as monks and priests, painted here some eight hundred years ago as a pointed joke about Kyoto's temple establishment. It follows Myoe, the scholar-monk who revived the mountain temple in 1206, the cultured gatherings he hosted, and the lingering question of which artist actually painted the scrolls historians now call the ancestor of manga. It also traces a quieter gift from the monk Eisai: tea seeds planted here that became Japan's first tea garden.