Daitoku-ji is a walled monastic complex in north-west Kyoto containing more than twenty sub-temples, several of them open to the public. It was founded in 1315 and grew under the patronage of the unconventional fourteenth-century abbot Ikkyū Sōjun (the same Ikkyū later imagined as a child-monk hero in postwar Japanese cartoons) into one of the most influential Zen institutions in the country, deeply connected to the development of the tea ceremony — the great tea master Sen no Rikyū studied here, and is buried in one of the sub-temples.
Most visitors come for the sub-temples: Daisen-in for one of Japan's finest small rock gardens, Ryōgen-in for several gardens arrayed around a single hall, Zuihō-in for a 1960s rock garden by Mirei Shigemori with hidden Christian symbolism (its founding patron Ōtomo Sōrin was a Christian daimyō), and Kōtō-in for a moss garden seen through a single low gate. Each charges a separate admission and rewards a slow visit.