Tojo-ji temple, Buddhist temple in Tsuchiura, Japan.
Tojo-ji is a Shingon-lineage independent temple in the Higashijoji district of Tsuchiura, Ibaraki Prefecture, with the mountain name Chobozan and the cloister name Tokoin. Its main image is Yakushi Nyorai, the healing Buddha. The temple was founded in 796 by the monk Saizen as the head training centre of Tendai Buddhism in Hitachi Province, and its Yakushido hall was rebuilt during the Keian era of the 1640s and 1650s.
Founded in 796 by the monk Saizen as the head temple of Tendai Buddhism in Hitachi Province. In the Kamakura period it became a prayer temple of the Oda clan and was converted to Shingon Buddhism. When the Satake clan destroyed the Oda in the Tensho era, the temple lost their patronage; in the Edo period it received a shuinjo from the Tokugawa shogunate. The Yakushi Hall was rebuilt in the Keian era.
The temple's name is written 東城寺 and its mountain name is Chōbōzan; the main image is Yakushi Nyorai, the healing Buddha. The temple was founded in 796 by the monk Saisen as a Tendai headquarters in Hitachi Province, and in the Kamakura period it became the prayer temple of the Oda clan and was converted to Shingon. The Yakushi Hall was rebuilt in the Keian era (1648–1652).
Tojo-ji stands in the eastern part of Tsuchiura, in the Tojo-ji district that carries its name. The temple grounds are reached from the surrounding rural roads, and the Yakushi-do hall rebuilt in the Keian era is the main structure a visitor sees. The temple is a single independent Shingon-lineage foundation, not part of a larger pilgrimage network.
The temple holds a wooden seated statue of Kōchi Shōnin, a prefectural cultural property, along with a stone lantern, a boundary stone (kekkaishi) and a group of sutra mounds (kyōzuka). The kekkaishi marked the temple's sacred boundary, and the kyōzuka are burial mounds for buried sutra copies.
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