History of Kiyomizu Temple

The history of Kiyomizu-Temple begins when a monk Kenshin was told in a dream by an old man, “Go north and find a crystal spring.”When he follows the instructions and heads north, he finds a waterfall with pure water at Otowa Mountain in Kyoto.

There, he meets a practicing hermit and is given a tree to carve a statue of thousand-armed Kannon.Two years later, Sakanoue no Tamura Maro, a warrior who visited Mt. Otowa, meets Kenshin.Impressed by the teachings of Kenshin, he built a temple with the eleven-faced thousand-armed Kannon as its principal image, and named it Kiyomizu-Temple after Otowa Waterfall.