Daitoku-ji and Jukō-in: Remembering Through Tea

On 7 September 2021, members of the Urasenke tea family gathered at Jukō-in for memorial services. Among those remembered were two women: the wife of Sen Sōtan, honoured at her 350th memorial observance, and the wife of Urasenke's ninth head, honoured at her 250th. The family's report records offerings of tea followed by sutra chanting led by the temple's abbot.^[1]

Neither woman is the name most readily associated with Jukō-in. That is Sen no Rikyū, the sixteenth-century tea master whose grave makes the subtemple an important place in tea history. Yet this family observance opens another part of the institution's history. Jukō-in could remember a founder of a tradition and generations of people connected with its continuation.

The temple had not even begun as Rikyū's memorial. It was established for a warrior. How did that foundation become a place where tea families maintained relationships with their dead—and why did the process produce paintings, new rooms, and continuing ceremonies rather than simply a cemetery?

Jukō-in belongs to Daitoku-ji, a Rinzai Zen monastery in northern Kyoto. The larger precinct is essential to understanding the smaller foundation. Daitoku-ji developed around the teacher Shūhō Myōchō in the early fourteenth century, suffered destruction during the Ōnin War, and was revived under Ikkyū Sōjun. Its buildings subsequently acquired different patrons and dates.^[2]

The main ceremonial axis runs through gates towards the Buddha Hall and Dharma Hall. These give the monastery a shared religious centre. Around that centre stand subtemples, or tatchū: smaller compounds with identities and histories of their own. Jukō-in is one of them. It is not another name for the whole monastery, nor is it simply a side room in the main hall.

The distinction permits two scales of belonging. A family could establish a particular memorial relationship within a smaller foundation while connecting it to Daitoku-ji's religious community. The monastery's common identity did not require every patron's dead to become indistinguishable from everyone else's.

Daitoku-ji's principal Dharma Hall offers an instructive parallel to the gifts later made at Jukō-in. The institutional record dates its rebuilding to 1636, for the 300th memorial observance of the monastery's founding teacher, with support from the Inaba family. An anniversary helped occasion a substantial building project.^[2]

A memorial date can do something that general respect cannot: it establishes a particular occasion for action. A building supplied for that occasion may then remain useful long afterwards. At the centre of Daitoku-ji and within Jukō-in, remembrance became one reason to add to the monastery's architecture.

This gives the precinct a history different from that of a single palace constructed to one patron's programme. The axial halls and surrounding foundations belong together, but they do not all commemorate the same person or embody one simultaneous act of building. Following Jukō-in's relationships means entering that larger arrangement, then attending to the particular obligations gathered within one compound.

In 1566, Miyoshi Yoshitsugu founded Jukō-in in memory of his adoptive father, Miyoshi Nagayoshi. Nagayoshi had been a daimyō, a military lord, and had died two years earlier. The founding monk was Shōrei Sōkin, an abbot of Daitoku-ji.^[3]

Patron and monk brought different kinds of continuity to the project. Yoshitsugu's relationship with the dead man belonged to a warrior household. Shōrei's religious position connected the new memorial with Daitoku-ji. The foundation made a particular family's remembrance part of an institution capable of performing Buddhist services.

That first purpose still has an identifiable object. The national cultural-property register records a coloured painting on silk of Nagayoshi, owned by Jukō-in and dated 1566. It is a posthumous image belonging to the same year as the foundation.^[4] The warrior is consequently present in the temple's surviving material history, not merely mentioned in the preface to a story about tea.

A portrait gives remembrance a specific subject. The image of Nagayoshi identifies the person for whom this foundation was established. Rooms provided a place for observance; the portrait gave his memory a visible presence within the institution.

Rikyū's connection came through Shōrei. The temple's published history records his Zen study with the monk and his choice of Jukō-in as his mortuary temple. It later became the burial place of successive heads of the three Sen tea families: Omotesenke, Urasenke, and Mushakōjisenke.^[5]

This was an additional relationship, not a replacement foundation. The temple could preserve the memory of a warrior patron, its own founding monk, and a tea master. Their connections converged through a religious institution without making them members of one literal household.

The sequence helps explain the difference between influence and belonging. Admiring Rikyū's tea practice might lead someone to imitate an arrangement of utensils. Choosing a mortuary temple established another kind of connection, one involving services and commemoration after death. The later tea families inherited reasons to return to Jukō-in that were more specific than admiration for an elegant historical setting.

Jukō-in's main hall makes these relationships architectural. The national building record dates it to 1583 and identifies a six-room hōjō plan, excluding later enlargements. A hōjō is an abbot's residence and working religious interior. The term should not conjure a purpose-built picture gallery.^[6]

Painted sliding partitions, called fusuma, form part of the rooms. Kanō Eitoku and his father Shōei supplied the celebrated sixteenth-century painting programme. In Eitoku's bird-and-flower composition, a spreading tree crosses the divisions between panels. The handles remain plainly visible within the painted world. These surfaces are images and architectural fittings at the same time.^[7]

The room does not ask its occupants to choose between those functions. Closed partitions make the image continuous across a wall; opening a partition changes the enclosure. A painting made for such a setting participates in the ways the rooms can be joined or separated. Removing it to a museum preserves an object but changes the relationship through which that object was originally encountered.

The contrast in scale within the interior is equally instructive. Eitoku's composition occupies the large partitions of the central room. Shōei's fish-and-lotus paintings decorate smaller panels in the Buddhist shrine room. In the published installation photograph, an altar and its offerings stand above those smaller paintings.^[8] The images belong to a place of worship without each having to depict a Buddhist figure.

Art historian Gregory Levine's study of Jukō-in argues that its portraits, paintings, and architecture should be understood together within mortuary practice, rather than treating the sliding-door paintings as detached masterpieces. His account particularly emphasizes the memorial images of Nagayoshi, Shōrei, and Rikyū.^[9]

The portrait identifies a person; the painted partitions organize an interior; the shrine room supplies an explicitly devotional setting. Together they give a memorial community more than one way to engage with its surroundings, from addressing an image to moving between rooms furnished for different activities.

It also explains why Jukō-in's art is relevant to its transition into a tea-family memorial. The new relationship entered a religious interior that already had its own patrons, images, and purposes. Tea did not arrive at an empty aesthetic stage. Its practitioners became connected with a place where other memories had already acquired form.

A later gift makes the continuing relationship particularly clear. Around 1740, Jukō-in received the tea room Kan'in-seki from Joshinsai, the seventh head of Omotesenke. Temple interpretation associates the donation with Rikyū's 150th memorial observance. It describes the three-mat room as expressing his preferred manner of tea.^[10]

The two propositions belong together: the room was a later act of remembrance, and its makers referred back to Rikyū. Calling it a room “in Rikyū's taste” is therefore quite different from calling it a room he built or personally used.

Architectural historian Nakamura Masao gives the donation a more concrete setting. He dates it to 1740, identifies an account book for Jukō-in's small room, and notes the recorded name of a carpenter, Jūemon. He describes the tea room as made by altering part of the shoin, the residential or reception building behind the main hall.^[11]

The evidence brings the anniversary down to the level of an actual project. Someone had to provide a room, adapt an existing building, and record expenditure. The tea family's reverence took the form of a useful addition to the temple, rather than remaining a statement about the superiority of an earlier age.

The protected building is larger than the tiny tea room alone. Its national register lists the three-mat Kan'in-seki, a two-mat preparation space, another tea room called Masudoko-seki, two six-mat rooms, and a veranda.^[12] The intimate setting depended on neighbouring spaces with different functions. Preparing tea and receiving people required provision beyond the small area in which host and guests would meet.

A photograph of Kan'in-seki shows how concentrated that smaller room is: the hearth interrupts the matting, a post and partial wall divide the interior, and a hanging scroll occupies the alcove. The image records a furnished setting, not a ceremony in progress.^[13] Its compactness becomes more intelligible when placed within the larger group of rooms rather than imagined as an isolated hut.

The anniversary gift could thus serve both recollection and future activity. It referred to Rikyū while providing a place in which tea could continue to be practised. The donor's generation did not merely preserve an old possession; it made something new through its understanding of the inherited practice.

Here the memorial generated a commission, and the commission furnished a setting available beyond the commemorative occasion. Kan'in-seki made an anniversary useful to later generations: a room associated with Rikyū's memory could also accommodate their own practice.

Architecture provides capacity, but an anniversary still needs people to observe it. The 2021 service shows the relationship being enacted rather than merely inherited as a title.

The two women commemorated that day were identified through several generations of the tea family. Sōtan's wife was also the mother of Urasenke's fourth head. The wife of its ninth head was the mother of its tenth. The report also records observances for other members of the family, including a former head and his wife. Living relatives attended; representatives of the tea family offered bowls; the temple's abbot led the chanting.^[1]

The division of activity is revealing. The descendants did something distinctive to their tradition, while the monk conducted Buddhist worship. Tea and temple service met in one observance without becoming the same act. Jukō-in supplied a religious relationship that a family tree or a display of historic utensils could not supply by itself.

The women's presence in the record also changes the scale of the story. A succession of celebrated masters is only one way of describing a lineage. This ceremony remembered people through marriage and parenthood as well as through formal succession. Its family history was wider than a row of professional titles.

The report gives little of the women's individual lives, but names them as recipients of observances centuries later. The family had reasons to remember them other than professional achievement in tea.

There is a shorter rhythm as well. An Urasenke notice dated 24 August 2024 announced that Rikyū's monthly memorial service at Jukō-in on the twenty-eighth would be conducted privately because of an approaching typhoon. People were asked not to come.^[14]

The notice separated holding the service from receiving visitors. Its practical message was that the observance would proceed within a smaller circle. Remembrance could continue without being offered as a public event.

Taken together, the anniversary report and the monthly notice show two ways time brings people back to this particular temple. A major memorial can prompt a new room; a recurring service can require little public display at all. The enduring relationship lies in having reasons to perform these acts again, not in making every occasion equally grand.

Jukō-in's painted interior has also acquired new forms of care. DNP, the company that produced high-resolution reproductions of part of the Kanō programme, describes scanning and printing the originals, with damage such as insect holes reduced through supervised digital work. Those interventions were made in the reproductions, not presented as repairs physically carried out on the original paintings.^[15]

The distinction allows two different things to be retained: fragile painted objects and the experience of an image occupying its architectural position. A substitute panel cannot supply the original paper's material history. It can preserve a relationship of image, scale, and room that would otherwise be difficult to encounter when the original is elsewhere.

This is a selective act of transmission. Even a reproduction made from the existing work involves decisions about whether damage should remain conspicuous. The aim described by the producer was not to create a newly imagined Kanō painting, but to make the surviving composition legible while limiting the distraction of losses. The reproduction must still be identified for what it is.

An event documented at Jukō-in in 2018 used these reproductions for close study with a museum curator. The programme also included the abbot's account of the temple, the tea rooms, and Rikyū's grave.^[16] That occasion connected art appreciation with the place's other relationships rather than treating the rooms as containers for isolated pictures.

Another addition works differently. Hiroshi Senju's waterfall paintings were dedicated to the shoin completed in 2013. A published photograph of the Kyoto installation shows white falls against blue fields, extended across the room's partitions.^[17] These are new paintings, not replacements pretending to be sixteenth-century surfaces.

The new commission and the Kanō reproductions answer different needs. One continues an inherited composition in its setting; the other gives a later building an artistic identity of its own. The compound now accommodates both forms of work, each with its own date and purpose.

For Jukō-in, this is a continuation of a documented local pattern: later relationships have added to the foundation without erasing its earlier purposes. The eighteenth-century tea-room donation and the modern painting commission are not the same kind of gift. Both, however, prevent the temple's material history from being confined to the year of its establishment.

Jukō-in's history contains several routes by which a relationship could continue after death. A warrior's family founded a memorial. A monk linked it to Daitoku-ji. A tea master chose it as his mortuary temple. Later descendants marked anniversaries, added rooms, and returned for services.

These connections did not transform the entire monastery into Rikyū's monument. Daitoku-ji retained its shared religious centre, while Jukō-in retained memories older than its tea associations. The smaller foundation could accommodate a growing network of obligations precisely because it was an institution, with a setting and religious work of its own.

Reverence could generate further activity. A gift made for an anniversary furnished another place for tea. A family practice became part of an offering to the family's dead. A painted interior continued to be used and interpreted while its vulnerable surfaces received different treatment.

The tea offered at the 2021 service brings that history to a particular action. An inherited practice was used to honour people within the inheritance. Jukō-in provided the religious place where the gesture could become part of a memorial service. The connection between tea and temple was renewed in the offering and the service that followed it.