Kenchōji Temple: A Dragon Worth Looking Up To

Before the dragon

The approach gives you some preparation for the scale, if not the expression. In the wooded hills of Kamakura, Kenchōji’s great wooden Sanmon gate towers over the visitors beneath it. Long before reaching the dragon, you are already looking up.

Founded in 1253 by the regent Hōjō Tokiyori, with the Chinese monk Rankei Dōryū as its first abbot, Kenchōji became a major centre of Zen training. It ranks first among Kamakura’s Five Great Zen Temples. The imposing entrance begins to make sense.

Its construction story is less imposing. The present gate went up in 1775 and is known as the Tanuki Gate. According to legend, a tanuki the temple had been feeding repaid the favour by disguising itself as a monk and travelling to collect donations for the work. In one version, a maid at an inn caught it washing its tail in the bath. That version does not end well for the tanuki, but the money still reached Kenchōji.

Nearby hangs a bronze bell cast in 1255, only two years after the temple’s founding. Its surface has weathered to blue-green, but the inscription, composed by Rankei Dōryū himself, still carries the name Kenchō Zenji. Much of the temple has been rebuilt over the centuries; this bell survives from its earliest years, and it is still rung every evening.

A face with a purpose

The dragon on the ceiling of the Hattō, or Dharma Hall, is Unryūzu, the painting Koizumi Junsaku completed and dedicated in 2000. Koizumi imagined a creature that had lived for thousands of years, and worked that immense age into its whiskers and scales. A whisker on a creature that old, he reasoned, could not have grown easily; it had to be more like a thorn. Scales painted too smoothly would look like a carp’s.

The dragon was not painted where it lives. The Dharma Hall is a protected cultural property, and Koizumi was not permitted to paint directly onto its ceiling. He worked on paper instead, in sections, in a 120-mat room elsewhere on the temple grounds. A creature thousands of years old took him a year and seven months. The panels were then mounted overhead.

Beyond the great halls

Beyond the halls, the path continues into greenery. A seated Daruma faces the passing visitors, his stern expression framed by heavy eyebrows and a beard. He also wears a large hoop earring and, where his robe opens, a carved tuft of chest hair. Behind him, the view is all bamboo.