is a sub-temple of

Daitoku-ji is a Buddhist temple, one of fourteen autonomous branches of the Rinzai school of Japanese Zen. It is located in Kita-ku, Kyoto, Japan. The "mountain name" ('' sangō'') by which it is known is . The Daitoku-ji temple complex today covers mor ...

Kyoto Kyoto (; Japanese: , ''Kyōto'' ), officially , is the capital city of Kyoto Prefecture in Japan. Located in the Kansai region on the island of Honshu, Kyoto forms a part of the Keihanshin metropolitan area along with Osaka and Kobe. , the ...

, Japan. It was founded by

Toyotomi Hideyoshi , otherwise known as and , was a Japanese samurai and '' daimyō'' ( feudal lord) of the late Sengoku period regarded as the second "Great Unifier" of Japan.Richard Holmes, The World Atlas of Warfare: Military Innovations that Changed the C ...

in 1582 as the mortuary temple of

Oda Nobunaga was a Japanese '' daimyō'' and one of the leading figures of the Sengoku period. He is regarded as the first "Great Unifier" of Japan. Nobunaga was head of the very powerful Oda clan, and launched a war against other ''daimyō'' to unif ...

. Hideyoshi granted the temple three hundred koku and staged his celebrated Daitoku-ji tea gathering on its grounds in 1585. During the early years of the

Meiji period The is an era of Japanese history that extended from October 23, 1868 to July 30, 1912. The Meiji era was the first half of the Empire of Japan, when the Japanese people moved from being an isolated feudal society at risk of colonization ...

its precinct was demolished and its treasures relocated; Sōken-in was revived in 1926. The seated wooden statue of Oda Nobunaga of 1583, lacquered, with inlaid eyes and an inscription on the base, an Important Cultural Property, was returned in 1961. Nobunaga's funeral and Hideyoshi's foundation of the sub-temple 'with the very best wood available, a remarkable thing to see' was recounted by the Portuguese missionary

Luís Fróis Luís Fróis (1532 – 8 July 1597) was a Portuguese missionary who worked in Asia during the second half of the 16th century. While in Japan in 1582, he witnessed the attack on Honnō-ji, a Buddhist temple that ended in the death of Oda Nobuna ...

in his contemporary ''História de Japam''.

References

Buddhist temples in Kyoto Daitoku-ji temples Daitoku-ji {{Japan-religious-struct-stub

See also

References