Sanmon Gate
Sakata City’s Designated Cultural Property
Regarding the Completion of Repairs to the Sanmon Gate Roof at Tōryūzan Sōkōji
From April of Reiwa 7 (2025) until around late December, repairs were carried out on the roof of the Sanmon gate at our temple. We would like to express our deepest gratitude to everyone for the successful completion of this restoration work.
We received generous support from many people: our parishioners and devotees, affiliated temples with which we share ties, the City of Sakata through a subsidy provided because the gate is a designated municipal cultural property, visitors who came for sightseeing and offered their goodwill, and the temple officers who coordinated the construction work.
For more than 640 years, our temple has conveyed and embodied the Buddha’s teachings not only through the Sanmon gate, but also through its temple buildings, grounds, and gardens. We believe that preserving and maintaining these is an invaluable act directly connected to preserving the teachings themselves.
Zen cannot be fully expressed through words alone. At the same time, it is also the world of the Buddha that encompasses the reality unfolding openly before our eyes. The ancestral masters devised many ways to give visible form to that world, creating Zen gardens, architectural structures such as the Sanmon gate, and ink works including poetry and calligraphy.
We offer our heartfelt gasshō in gratitude that, through the accumulation of these precious and noble acts, we are able to pass the Sanmon gate on to the next generation.
An auspicious day in May, 2026
Sōkōji Temple
60th Head Priest
Sūkō Hara
Sanmon Gate
Sakata City’s Designated Cultural Property
Sculptures of the Buddha and his disciples are enshrined in the gate.
