The Rockefeller Collection in Focus: Jizo Bosatsu Asia Society
Home Jizo and the Six Realms The Japanese Temple Complex Making a Buddhist Image Inside the Image
The Japanese Temple Complex Gods, Buddhas, and Jizo at Kasuga-Kofukuji
Kasuga Shrine Mandala
Kasuga Shrine Mandala
Japan; Kamakura period (1185-1333), 1300
Hanging scroll; colors on silk
42 1/2 x 16 in. (107.9 x 41.2 cm)
Yuki Museum of Art, Osaka
Important Cultural Property
Large Buddhist temples in Japan, such as those erected by powerful families or by the state, are not single edifices but complexes comprised of several buildings, each of which houses its own set of images and serves a different function. Most temples of the premodern period would include a main hall (hondo), often called a golden hall (kondo); a lecture hall; a pagoda; a sutra repository; a belfry; and one or more elaborate gates leading into the compound. A major temple, such as Kofukuji in Nara, might have several kondo, a refectory, monks’ quarters, and other image or worship halls as dictated by the specific practices and beliefs upheld at the site. Large temple complexes with numerous buildings would house hundreds of images, produced and dedicated along with the various halls, sometimes over the course of centuries as compounds were expanded or rebuilt after fires or other disasters.

Kofukuji was constructed as the clan temple of the eminent Fujiwara family in the eighth century, when Nara was Japan’s capital. As a private temple, the complex was dedicated to the repose of the souls of deceased Fujiwara ancestors; but the state soon began to sponsor rites at the temple for national protection and other imperial concerns. With the backing of the Fujiwara and the state, and the great wealth received from the temple’s landholdings, Kofukuji was one of premodern Japan’s most powerful institutions. Moreover, the temple did not stand alone on the eastern edge of Nara. Approximately one mile across the plain, at the base of the mountains, stood Kasuga Shrine, another Fujiwara tutelary compound. Kasuga Shrine and Kofukuji served complementary functions, the former housing the ancestral spirits or gods (kami) of the indigenous Shinto religion that protected and legitimized the Fujiwara line, and the latter aiding family members in the afterlife. By the eleventh century, the shrine and the temple were seen as two halves of a single institution, a grand spiritual center in which even the deities were interrelated. The Jizo Bosatsu image in the Rockefeller Collection was likely created to represent one of the important divinities of this great complex.

By the time the sculptor Zen’en was producing images like the Jizo Bosatsu for the temples of Nara in the early thirteenth century, the temple complex was a highly structured religious and political entity that formed an integral part of Japanese society and culture.


The five Buddhist divinities connected with Kasuga Shrine appear above a bird’s-eye view of the shrine precinct. Jizo, with his shaven head and priest’s staff, is second from left; Juichimen Kannon and Monju are at far left and far right, respectively.