Kennin-ji

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San-mon (三門, or sammon, main door), bôketsurô （望闕楼)

風神雷神図（Fujin and Raijin）

Ceiling by Koizumi Junsaku (小泉淳作^?)

Kennin-ji (建仁寺, Kennin-ji^?), also called Kennen-ji, is a historic Zen Buddhist temple at 584 Komatsu-cho, Higashiyama-ku, near Gion in Kyoto, Japan. Founded in 1202, it is the first Zen temple in Japan.

The monk Eisai, credited with introducing Zen to Japan, served as Kennin-ji's founding abbot and is buried on the temple grounds. For its first years the temple combined Zen, Tendai, and Shingon practices, but it became a purely Zen institution under the eleventh abbot, Lanxi Daolong (蘭渓道隆, Lanxi Daolong^?) (1213-1278). The Zen master Dōgen, later founder of the Japanese Soto sect, trained at Kennin-ji. It is one of the Rinzai sect's headquarter temples.

When first built, the temple contained seven principal buildings. It has suffered from fires through the centuries, and was rebuilt in the mid-thirteenth century by Zen master Enni (円爾, Enni^?) (1202-1280), and again in the sixteenth century with donations of buildings from nearby temples Ankoku-ji (安国寺, Ankoku-ji^?) and Tōfuku-ji.

Today Kennin-ji's buildings include the Abbot’s Quarters (Hōjō), given by Ankoku-ji in 1599; the Dharma Hall (Hatto), built in 1765; a tea house built in 1587 to designs by tea master Sen no Rikyū for Toyotomi Hideyoshi; and the Imperial Messenger Gate (Chokushimon), said to date from the Kamakura era (1185–1333), and still showing marks from arrows. It also has fourteen subtemples on the Kennin-ji precincts and about seventy associated temples throughout Japan.

Kennin-ji contains notable paintings by Tawaraya Sōtatsu, Tamura Soryu^{[citation needed]} and Hashimoto Kansetsu (橋本関雪, Hashimoto Kansetsu^?) (1883-1945), as well as a remarkable ceiling painting of two dragons by Koizumi Junsaku (小泉淳作, Koizumi Junsaku^?) (1924-), created in 2002 for the temple's 800th anniversary.