Sanzen-in Temple

This guide to Sanzen-in Temple in Kyoto begins in nine hundred eighty six, when the monk Eshin Sozu and his sister, the nun Anyo-ni, set out to build their grieving parents a hall for three gilded Buddhist statues, only to find the figures too tall for an ordinary ceiling. The siblings solved it with unusual carpentry, still visible in the hall's curved wooden roof, centuries before the temple settled into its present home in Ohara in eighteen seventy one. The moss garden nearby scatters small stone jizo among the trees, carved much later by the sculptor Takashi Sugimura.