Many ducks are lazing around by the pond in Shinsen-en

Duck in Shinsen-en — Ducks in Shinsen-en

Just south of Nijo Castle, in the very heart of Kyoto, sits a modest little temple called Shinsen-en. “Modest,” however, feels like an unfair adjective when you remember what this place once was. Founded in 794, alongside the construction of the Heian capital, Shinsen-en originally served as an imperial garden—a forbidden garden, no less, reserved exclusively for the emperor. Today it occupies only a sliver of land wedged between Oshikoji Street and Oike Street, a bonsai-sized remnant of what was once a grand palace landscape.

The deity enshrined here is Zennyo Ryūō, a dragon goddess associated with rain. According to the old chronicles, the monk Kūkai performed a ritual here during a terrible drought in the ninth century, successfully coaxing rain from an uncooperative sky. From that moment on, the site gained a reputation as Kyoto’s premier rainmaking sanctuary. In other words, before the invention of meteorology, the people of the capital preferred to trust Kūkai over anything resembling a weather forecast.

Today a small pond occupies the center of the grounds. A lone duck drifts across the water—the same one that appears in the photograph, no mythic guardian spirit, just a comfortable freeloader who has discovered the virtues of living in a sacred space. Modern visitors no longer come here to pray for rain; their smartphones can tell them the chance of precipitation with cold efficiency. And yet, they still arrive with hands pressed together, offering prayers for matters far more complicated than the weather.

Shinsen-en on Google Map

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