Kyoto

Emperor Kanmu moved the Japanese capital to a new site in 794 CE, naming it Heian-kyo, "capital of peace and tranquility," after an earlier attempt to relocate the court to nearby Nagaoka-kyo had gone badly. Part of the motive was distance: the previous capital, Nara, had grown politically entangled with its own great Buddhist temples, and Kanmu wanted an administration less encumbered by monastic influence. The new city was laid out on a rectangular grid modeled on the Tang dynasty Chinese capital of Chang'an, with the imperial palace at its northern center and broad avenues running south, a plan whose street pattern is still traceable in the modern city.

Heian-kyo, gradually known simply as Kyoto, "capital city," remained Japan's seat of imperial and religious authority for more than a thousand years even as real political power shifted to shogunal governments based elsewhere. The emperor, understood in Shinto terms as descended from the sun goddess Amaterasu, continued to perform the court's ceremonial and religious functions from the city through repeated changes of military rule, until the Meiji Restoration moved the imperial seat to Tokyo in 1868, ending Kyoto's thousand year run as the country's capital.

Japanese geomancy held the northeast direction to be spiritually dangerous, the kimon or "demon gate" through which misfortune entered a city, and Heian-kyo's planners addressed it deliberately: the monk Saicho had already founded a monastery on Mount Hiei, just northeast of the new capital, in 788 CE, and it grew into Enryaku-ji, headquarters of the Tendai school and one of the most influential monastic centers in Japanese history. Enryaku-ji's training produced, directly or through its libraries and debates, the founders of several later schools that reshaped Japanese Buddhism: Honen and Shinran, whose Pure Land teaching became Jodo and Jodo Shinshu; Eisai and Dogen, who established Rinzai and Soto Zen; and Nichiren, founder of the tradition bearing his name.

Kyoto's Shinto life ran alongside this Buddhist establishment rather than beneath it. Fushimi Inari Taisha, in the city's south, had already been an important shrine to Inari, kami of rice and prosperity, since before the capital moved there, and it remains one of the most visited Shinto sites in Japan. The Historic Monuments of Ancient Kyoto, a group of seventeen temples, shrines and one castle across the city and neighboring Uji and Otsu, were inscribed together as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1994, recognition of a religious landscape that outlasted the political capital it grew up around.