Today, I finally visited the Kamakura Treasure Museum. 

It is situated on the Tsurugaoka Hachimangu Shrine grounds in a beautiful setting surrounded by lots of trees and of course, the autumn colors were astounding, especially the yellow from the Gingko tree.


The featured exposition is about The 800th Memorial Anniversary of Honen Shonin (1133-1212), who studied Buddhism and found the true way of universal salvation through the practice of nembutsu revealed in the Buddhist scripture text by Shan-tao. Honen established the nembutsu as an absolutely independent practice. In the spring of 1175, he founded Jodo Shu, or the Pure Land Denomination, in Japan. The center of his teaching was at Yoshimizu, where Chion-in, the Head Temple of Jodo Shu, now stands.
Masako, wife of warrior Minamoto no Yoritomo, the first shogun who founded the Kamakura government shogunate, was a follower of Honen. And so the center of the Jodo Shu sect is established at the Komyoji, the temple in my neighborhood. Look also at the following blogs: Oct. 18, 2009; April14, 2009; July 31, 2008, and Sept.23, 2007.

This is Yoshitada Shonin a treasure from Kamakura City and sculpted from wood in the 12th century here in Kamakura, in the time when all the sculpting and carving of wood started because all of the temple building and developed into the Kamakura Bori.

They also had some wonderful maps hanging from the Komyoji.
I was allowed to take some picture from a book, because it was sold out.

This map is made in 1720. To the south is the beach with some some greenlands and to the north it is build against a rocky hill.
A lot of temples in Kamakura protect themselves in that way with their back against a hill.

This second map was drawn in 1850 and again you can clearly see the hills surrounding the temple and a small river flowing in to the sea. This map was about 2 by 2 meters big!






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