Kozan-ji traces its origins to 774, when legend holds that Emperor Konin ordered temples built in the mountain valley of Togano, deep behind Jingo-ji temple in an area famous for autumn foliage. The accuracy of those early claims is unclear, but the temple took its definitive form in 1206, when the Kegon Buddhist monk Myoe received the land from Emperor Go-Toba. Myoe chose the site deliberately -- Togano was considered ideal for mountain asceticism, far from the political tangles of the capital. He named the temple using a passage from the Avatamsaka Sutra, the foundational text of his Kegon school. Myoe was no ordinary abbot. He kept a meticulous dream journal from 1196 to 1223, documenting visions that deeply influenced his religious thinking. He fought corruption within Buddhist institutions and held intellectual salons where notable figures of the age gathered.

The Choju-jinbutsu-giga consists of four picture scrolls created across several generations. The first two scrolls, generally dated to the mid-twelfth century, depict animals behaving as humans with no accompanying text -- a purely visual narrative technique that would not become common in Japanese art for centuries. Frogs and rabbits wrestle, shoot arrows, and tumble through scenes rendered with confident, flowing brushstrokes. Some scholars attribute these earliest scrolls to the monk Toba Sojo, though the shifting styles suggest multiple artists. The third and fourth scrolls, likely from the thirteenth century, introduce human figures alongside the animals. What makes the scrolls revolutionary is their use of techniques that would later define manga: expressive faces, implied motion through 'speed lines,' sequential visual storytelling, and the right-to-left reading direction still standard in Japanese comics. Today, the originals are split between the Tokyo National Museum and the Kyoto National Museum, with reproductions displayed at the temple.

On the temple grounds sits a humble, terraced plot that holds an outsized claim: the oldest tea garden in Japan. In the early Kamakura period, the Zen master Eisai returned from China carrying tea seeds and gave them to Myoe, who planted them at Kozan-ji. The plants thrived in the mountain climate. Myoe helped popularize tea drinking culture from this small garden, and the tea produced here became so celebrated that only leaves cultivated from Kozan-ji's plants were considered 'true tea.' Tea-producing regions across Japan still pay homage to the temple in recognition of this heritage. It is a quiet, unremarkable-looking patch of ground, yet it represents one of the most consequential introductions in Japanese cultural history -- the moment tea moved from a Chinese import to a Japanese institution.

Fire and war have destroyed Kozan-ji multiple times. The oldest surviving structure is the Sekisui-in, a scripture hall from the Kamakura period built in the graceful irimoyazukuri style with a gabled, shingled roof. A 1230 diagram held at nearby Jingo-ji shows what the temple once contained: a great gate, a main hall, a three-storied pagoda, halls dedicated to Amitabha and to Lohan, a bell tower, and a Shinto shrine. All of these are gone except the Sekisui-in. The current main hall was originally part of Ninna-ji, another famous Kyoto temple, and was relocated here. The temple's extraordinary collection of National Treasures -- ancient dictionaries, Tang-dynasty manuscripts, portrait scrolls -- are mostly on loan to national museums in Tokyo and Kyoto. What remains on the mountain is the stillness Myoe sought: cedar forest, autumn maples, moss-covered stone, and the tea garden that changed a nation's drinking habits.