The temple that stands over the kofun did not arrive until six hundred years after the empty tomb story. Built in the early thirteenth century during the Kamakura period, Daruma-ji was a Zen establishment from its inception -- and that made it a target. In the early fourteenth century, Buddhists who opposed the spread of Zen in Japan razed the temple entirely. A full century passed before Ashikaga Yoshinori, the sixth Muromachi shogun, ordered its reconstruction in 1430. The rebuilt temple barely survived two hundred years. During the Sengoku period of civil war, the warlord Matsunaga Hisahide -- notorious for burning down the Great Buddha Hall of Todai-ji -- torched Daruma-ji as well. Emperor Ogimachi ordered it rebuilt once more. Each destruction and resurrection layered new meaning onto the site. The temple became a monument not just to a vanishing sage, but to the stubborn persistence of belief.

Among the temple's most unusual artifacts is a stone statue of a dog named Yukimaru. According to tradition, Yukimaru belonged to Prince Shotoku and possessed extraordinary abilities: he could understand human speech and read Buddhist writings. The statue sits in the temple grounds as a quiet tribute to a companion of legend. Yukimaru's fame proved durable. In 2013, fourteen centuries after the prince supposedly walked these roads, the city of Oji adopted Yukimaru as its official yuru-chara mascot. The cute, round-eyed cartoon version of the literate dog now appears on everything from city brochures to local merchandise. In 2017, the city even commissioned a drone shaped like a flying Yukimaru puppy, which drew international media coverage from Vice and Tokyo Weekender. An ancient legend about a scripture-reading dog became a modern municipal branding campaign.

Daruma-ji holds an unusually rich collection of designated cultural properties for a temple of its size. A wooden seated statue of Daruma, commissioned by Ashikaga Yoshinori and carved in 1430, was designated an Important Cultural Property in 1909. A wooden seated statue of Prince Shotoku received the same designation in 1923. A pair of paintings -- one depicting Shotoku, the other Daruma -- are also designated Important Cultural Properties, alongside a silk painting of the Buddha's death that now resides at the Nara National Museum. A wooden seated statue of Senju Kannon from the Muromachi period was designated a tangible cultural property in 2005. The Daruma-ji Chukoki Sekido, a stone monument erected in 1448, records the temple's restoration with the support of the Muromachi bakufu government. Together, these artifacts trace a line from the legend of the empty tomb through centuries of patronage by shoguns and emperors.

Daruma-ji sits in western Nara Prefecture, far from the tourist crowds that throng the deer parks and great temples of Nara city. The Kitakatsuragi District is agricultural country -- rice paddies, low hills, and the flat expanse of the Yamato Plain stretching toward the Kii Mountains. The temple is modest in scale, its wooden halls and garden walls fitting the quiet character of Oji. Visitors who make the journey find a place where the boundary between history and myth blurs comfortably. The kofun mound is still there beneath the temple precincts, the original reason for everything that was built above it. Whether one comes as a Buddhist pilgrim, a history student, or simply a curious traveler, Daruma-ji offers something rare: a place where a story told in the year 720 still shapes the landscape today.