, popularly known as Toyokawa Inari (shinjitai: 豊川稲荷; kyūjitai: 豐川稲荷), is a Sōtō Zen Buddhist temple located in the city of Toyokawa in eastern Aichi Prefecture, Japan. Although the temple's main image is that of the thousand-armed form of the bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara (Senju Kannon), it is more well-known for its guardian deity Toyokawa Dakini Shinten, a syncretic goddess who assumed characteristics of Inari, the Shinto kami of fertility, rice, agriculture, industry and worldly success. Despite the presence of a torii gate at the entrance (a relic of the amalgamation of Buddhism and native beliefs before the early modern period), the institution is a Buddhist temple and has no overt association with the Shinto religion. Background Dakiniten is a Japanese Buddhist deity who originated from the ḍākinī, a type of female spirit in Hinduism and Buddhism. Said in Buddhist belief to have once been a race of malevolent demonesses who preyed on humans, they were eventually subjugated by the buddha Vairocana, who took the form of the wrathful deity Mahākāla (Daikokuten in Japanese) to wean them away from their human-eating habits and lead them to the Buddhist path. In contrast to Nepalese and Tibetan Buddhism, where 'ḍākinī' eventually came to denote female personifications of enlightenment (e.g. Vajrayoginī) or to human women with a certain amount of spiritual development, ḍākinīs were regarded as members of the retinue of the god Yama (the judge of the dead) upon their introduction to Japan via the esoteric Shingon and Tendai schools before they were eventually coalesced into a single goddess called 'Dakiniten', who gradually developed an independent cult of her own from the end of the Heian period onwards. The ḍākinīs were associated with scavengers such as jackals and foxes, which led to Dakiniten becoming syncretized with the Shinto agricultural kami Inari (as foxes were seen as the messengers of this deity) and her gaining certain traits of the latter. Indeed, Dakiniten's cult and that of Inari became inextricably fused by the medieval period that the name 'Inari' was even popularly applied to places of Dakiniten worship. Although Dakiniten was commonly depicted as a woman riding a white fox, bearing a sword in one hand and a wish-granting jewel (cintāmaṇi) on the other, the Dakiniten of Toyokawa Inari is shown bearing bundles of rice stalks on a carrying-pole over her right shoulder instead of a sword. History Myōgon-ji was founded in 1441 by the Buddhist