Next door to the temple is an architectural office that has a beautifully landscaped entrance. I thought that it was part of the temple gardens but apparently it is completely separate.
I finally reached the end of the road at the point where it intersects with Route 4, the Sendai bypass. This is looking south on the bypass. It has four lanes and a lot of traffic. It is a bit of a problem when I walk in this directions because the places where you can cross are few and far between.
The next picture shows the bypass but looking north. The Dou'unji is just beyond the hill in the middle.
After walking close to a kilometer along the bypass sidewalk, I find a large sign, the vertical white sign with black lettering in the middle, that marks the entrance to the temple. The sign tells me the name and also the affiliation of the temple. It is a soto Zen temple. In Japan, there are two main branches of Zen, soto and rinzai. The main difference seems to be that soto assumes that becoming enlightened is a long, slow progress, where the practitioner makes progress in small increments. Rinzai, on the other hand, assumes that enlightenment is reached in a single, almost instantaneous step. At least that is my understanding. Rinzai is the sect that often appears in movies and videos, because during meditation a monk walks around and uses a large stick to hit anyone whose attention lapses. The whack is supposed to sometimes trigger the jump to nirvana.It is interesting to notice that the building on the corner is a Porche dealer. Somehow this seems to be very symbolic of modern Japan, the entrance to a 700 year old temple marked by one of the prime symbols of modern technology.
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