S P O T ／ SPOT-325

Kanozan Jinya-ji Temple

鹿野山神野寺かのうざんじんやじ

High on Mount Kano in Chiba Prefecture sits a temple that claims a near-impossible pedigree: Jinya-ji, said by tradition to have been founded in 598 by Prince Shotoku himself, which would make it the oldest temple in the Kanto region. Belonging to the Chisan school of Shingon Buddhism, it enshrines Yakushi Nyorai and the wrathful Wisdom King Gundari Myoo, and was once reckoned one of Kanto's three great mountain-ascetic training grounds. Its Muromachi-era front gate, with a simple thatched gabled roof, is a nationally designated Important Cultural Property; the main hall is a prefectural treasure. But the temple's strangest object is a carved white snake, venerated for centuries as the living incarnation of Gundari Myoo, fusing esoteric Buddhism with Japan's deep folk worship of serpents as deities of water and rebirth. A Nio mask attributed to the great sculptor Unkei is also preserved here. The temple briefly seized the national imagination in 1979, when three Bengal tigers escaped from a small zoo on its grounds, a jarring footnote in the history of a 1,400-year-old mountain sanctuary.