Daisen-ji Temple

Daisen-ji is a Tendai temple holding the rank of Betsukaku Honzan, set on the slope of Mt. Daisen inside Daisen-Oki National Park; its mountain name is Kakuban-zan. The principal image is Jizo Bosatsu, and the temple has long been known for Jizo worship.

Temple tradition says the monk Toshikata (Konren Shonin) opened it in 718, when it belonged to the Shingon school. It became Tendai in 865 and was designated a Betsukaku Honzan. In 1875, during the anti-Buddhist movement of the early Meiji era, the temple name was abolished and much of its land was confiscated. The name was restored in 1903, but the number of priests' quarters had fallen from 42 to 10. A series of fires in 1928 also destroyed the illustrated scroll of the temple's origins, the Shihon Chakushoku Daisen-ji Engi. Copies and photographs of it remain today.

The oldest building in the precincts is the Amida-do. Built in 1552, at the end of the Muromachi period, it has a hip roof of wooden shingles with gracefully curved eaves and is an Important Cultural Property. The seated wooden Amida Nyorai of about 2.79 m and its two attendants enshrined inside are also Important Cultural Properties. The main hall and bell tower are Registered Tangible Cultural Properties, and in 2016 the former precincts of Daisen-ji were designated a National Historic Site.

The stone-paved approach of natural stones, running from the entrance of Daisen-ji to Okunomiya of Ogamiyama Shrine, is about 700 m long and is presented as "the longest stone-paved road in Japan". On the right side of the approach is the mid-Edo-period cliff carving "Yoshimochi Jizo".

At the end of the stone path, the Okunomiya has a main hall, offering hall and worship hall built in 1805 in the late Edo period and designated Important Cultural Properties in 1988. This composite shrine is described as one of the largest gongen-zukuri shrines in Japan, and long corridor wings extend to the left and right of the worship hall. Its sacred gate was originally the front gate of Saigaku-in, the head residence of Daisen-ji, and was handed over from the temple to the shrine in 1875; because its doors open the opposite way, it is also called the "reverse gate" or "backward-facing gate". At the eve festival of the summer climbing season, after a Shinto rite at the Okunomiya, about 1,500 people carrying torches walk along the approach, and a summit festival is held the next day on the summit of Mt. Misen. The terminus bus stop "Daisenji" is on the first floor of the Daisen National Park Center, close to Mt. Daisen (about 1.6 km) and Daisen Makiba Milk no Sato (about 2.6 km).