Honganji

The headquarters temple of the Jōdo Shinshū in Japan, located in the Kyoto area. This establishment was originally not a temple at all, but the mausoleum containing the ashes of the founder of Jōdo Shinshū, Shinran (1173-1262), constructed in 1272 by his daughter Kakushinni in the Ōtani area outside Kyoto. During the two centuries following his death, many branches of the highly decentralized Jōdo Shinshū rose to prominence, often in competition with one another. Shinran's descendants, seeking to consolidate their influence over the school, played on the mausoleum's potential as a pilgrimage site and focal point of a cult of the founder. During this time, they rechristened the building as a temple, and installed an image of Amitābha Buddha, later erecting a separate building to house it. At the same time, they sponsored the publication and distribution of Shinran's works, and made the temple a centre of Jōdo Shinshū study. Under Shinran's eighth-generation descendant, Rennyo (1415-99), the temple reached a position of prominence, but this led monk-soldiers (sōhei) from Mt. Hiei to attack the buildings and level them in 1465. Ten years later, the temple was rebuilt on another site in the Yamashina area of Kyoto, where it resumed its growth. This structure was destroyed in another attack in 1532, and the tenth-generation caretaker, Shōnyo, moved to an Osaka branch of the Honganji built earlier by Rennyo and established it as the Honganji proper. In 1559, Kennyo was granted the title ‘abbot’ by the emperor. However, the warrior Oda Nobunaga, in his drive to quell the political power of the larger temples, attacked the Osaka temple, subduing it in 1580. Oda's successor, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, granted Kennyo land back in the Horikawa suburb of Kyoto, and another Honganji was erected and remains to this day. However, Kennyo's son Kyōnyo had refused to submit to Oda when the Osaka Honganji surrendered, and he made separate arrangements with Toyotomi's successors to construct a rival Honganji within the Kyoto city limits with himself as abbot. This came to be known as the Higashi-, or Eastern Honganji, while the Horikawa temple came to be known as the Nishi-, or Western Honganji. The split was finalized in 1619 when the government recognized both temples as independent entities.