Kiyomizu-dera清水寺

Temple tradition dates the founding to 778, when a monk from Nara, Kenshin (later Enchin), followed a dream up the Otowa hills and found a spring with a hermit meditating beside it. Two years later the general Sakanoue no Tamuramaro, hunting deer in the same hills, met Enchin and was persuaded to give up killing; tradition holds that he donated his own residence as the first main hall. The temple predates the move of the capital to Kyoto in 794, which is one reason it sits outside the Heian grid.

The buildings have burned many times. The present main hall and stage were rebuilt in 1633 with money from the third Tokugawa shogun, Iemitsu, after a fire in 1629, and most of the other halls, gates and the pagoda date from the same campaign in the 1630s. The temple belonged to the Hossō school of Nara Buddhism for most of its history and became the head of its own Kita-Hossō branch in 1965. It was inscribed with the Historic Monuments of Ancient Kyoto in 1994.

A cypress-bark roof needs renewing every few decades, and between 2017 and 2020 the main hall was wrapped in scaffolding while its hiwadabuki roof was relaid by hand in thin layers of hinoki bark. The stage floorboards were replaced at the same time. Photographs from those years show a white shed where the hall should be; the fresh, pale bark of the new roof has been darkening since.

The main hall is built in the kakezukuri (‘hanging’) style: half of it rests on the hillside and the front half, including the stage, stands on a frame of tall pillars rising from the valley floor, about 13 m below. The eighteen main posts are zelkova (keyaki) trunks. They are tied together by horizontal beams called nuki that pass straight through holes cut in the posts and are locked with wooden wedges. There are no nails; the grid of posts and through-beams flexes rather than breaks in an earthquake. The best view of this joinery is from the path below, near the Otowa waterfall, looking up.

On the stage itself, the floor is made of several hundred hinoki boards laid lengthwise towards the view, and the roof is not tiled but covered in cypress bark, with swept eaves. Inside the hall, behind the outer chamber where people pray, is a closed shrine holding the principal image, an eleven-headed Kannon with many arms. It is a hibutsu, a hidden image, shown to the public by tradition only once every 33 years; the last full showing was in 2000.

Before the stage, the vermilion Niōmon gate and the three-storey pagoda, at about 31 m one of the tallest of its type in Japan, face the city. Just beside them is the Zuigu-dō hall, where for a small fee you can do the tainai-meguri: you go down into complete darkness under the hall, guided by a rope of large prayer beads, to a lit stone carved with a Sanskrit letter, which you turn while making a wish. It is meant as a walk through the womb of a bodhisattva and back into the light.

Japanese has a saying, ‘to jump off the stage at Kiyomizu’, meaning to take a leap and commit to a risky decision. It comes from a real practice. People jumped believing that Kannon would protect them and grant a wish if they survived. Temple records from the Edo period list 234 jumps, and about 85 per cent of the jumpers lived, helped by the trees and soft ground below at the time. The Meiji government banned it in 1872, and the railing is there for a reason.

The Otowa waterfall below the hall is the spring the temple is named after. Its water falls in three channels, and visitors catch it in long-handled cups. Popular explanation assigns the streams to long life, success in study and luck in love, and warns that drinking from all three is greedy, though the temple does not insist on any of it. The cups are sterilised in cabinets between uses.

A stone monument in the grounds, set up in 1994, honours Aterui and More, leaders of the Emishi people of north-east Japan, whom Sakanoue no Tamuramaro defeated and brought to the capital, where they were executed in 802, reportedly despite his pleas for their lives. It is a quiet reminder that the temple’s founding patron built his career on a war of conquest. Every December the temple also hosts the announcement of the Kanji of the Year, brushed in giant strokes by the chief priest.

Kiyomizu is number 16 on the Saigoku pilgrimage of 33 Kannon temples, and pilgrims arrive with albums to collect the brushed calligraphy and red seals (goshuin) at the stamp office. During Sennichi-mairi in mid-August, when a single visit is said to be worth a thousand days of prayer, the inner sanctuary opens and the temple stays open late on some evenings. Spring and autumn night openings, with the hall lit up, are among the busiest nights of the Kyoto year.

The small Jishu Shrine behind the main hall is dedicated to a matchmaking deity and has two ‘love stones’ about 10 m apart; walking from one to the other with eyes closed is said to predict success in love. It has been closed for long repairs in recent years, so check before you go. Students come before exams, and couples come for charms.

The approach, Kiyomizu-zaka, and the steps of Sannen-zaka below it are part of the visit. A local warning holds that anyone who falls on Sannen-zaka will die within three years, and shops sell gourd charms (hyōtan) to ward that off. Kiyomizu-yaki pottery grew up along these streets; the Gojō-zaka district still has kilns and a pottery fair in early August. Shichimi spice blended to order on Sannen-zaka is a common thing for Kyoto people to buy here.