Antai-ji was founded in 1921 by Oka Sotan as a
monastery for scholars to study the
Shōbōgenzō. It was located in the Gentaku area of northern
Kyoto and many leading scholars studied there. Vacated during
World War II,
Kōdō Sawaki became its fifth abbot in 1949 and made it a place for
Zazen. However, because Sawaki was almost constantly on the move, most of the temple's responsibilities fell to his student,
Kōshō Uchiyama. Sawaki did not actually reside in the temple until 1962 when his legs became too weak to travel. With Sawaki's death in 1965, Uchiyama became the sixth abbot. During the late 1960s, the small temple became well known in the Zen community both in Japan and abroad for its devoted practice of zazen and formal begging, or
takuhatsu. It was unusual in Japan at the time to be supporting itself without income from parishioner families. Instead of performing ceremonies such as funerals to make money, Antai-ji relied completely on donations from lay practitioners and begging. During this time, Uchiyama took on several students who would later become prominent in their own right, such as
Shohaku Okumura and
Eishin Ikeda. The increase of visitors and the many new houses being built around the temple created much noise, which made it difficult for the practice of Zazen to continue at the Kyoto location. Therefore, the following abbot, Watanabe Koho (1942–2016), decided to move Antai-ji to its present location in northern Hyōgo. The temple was later demolished, and all that remains of the original Antai-ji is a fenced-off stone under a maple tree that used to be part of the temple garden just outside the abbot's room. It contains a memorial to
Sawaki Kodo. A
Jehovah's Witness church now stands approximately in its former location ==Northern Hyōgo==