Reigandō Cave and Unganzen-ji Temple (霊巌洞・雲巌禅寺) 霊巌洞・五百羅漢（雲巌禅寺）
Musashi is said to have written the Book of Five Rings here; along the path, 500 stone rakan.
The Unganzen-ji is a Sōtō school Zen temple that tradition says was founded in the Nanboku-chō period (1336–1392) by the Chinese monk Tōryō Eiyo, and it is the fourteenth place on the pilgrimage of the thirty-three Kannon temples of Kyūshū. In the mountain behind it opens the Reigandō, where the Iwato Kannon is venerated: according to legend the statue came from the sea on a plank after the boat carrying it was wrecked, and the cult is older than the temple. Miyamoto Musashi (1584–1645), invited to Kumamoto by the lord Hosokawa Tadatoshi in 1640, is said to have retreated there to write the ‘Book of Five Rings’ (五輪書, Gorin no sho), a treatise on the sword and on life. The official sources differ on the length of time: the municipality's guide speaks of the last five years of Musashi's life, the national tourism agency of the last two. The five hundred rakan were donated by the Kumamoto merchant Fuchidaya Gihei, who had them carved in Saga over twenty-four years; they did not exist in Musashi's time, and many lost their heads in the early years of the Meiji era (1868–1912), when the government treated Buddhism as a foreign religion.
Kumamoto
平公民館, 岩戸観音入口
