It's not clear to me if Youtube has been slapping ads on these videos - their language suggests they are, since I'm using copyrighted music, so they (apparently) throw on ads and the revenue goes to the artist. Works for me, though I hate ads! Let's all get ad blockers, is my point. Goodnight!
First things first: Japan can be cold. In the runup to the trip, I told friends that the forecast looked very British winter: damp, but mostly in the 50s or 40s, with snow and freezing temps mostly confined to the mountains. And that wasn't really wrong! But the other thing I knew in advance (but didn't fully appreciate until I was living in it) was that Japanese homes and buildings are typically not especially insulated. Culturally, the tradition has been using paper screens to sort of mark off a room, and to heat that individual room.
In big or business hotels, of course, this isn't the case, but in traditional lodgings, that's still what you'll find, and on the one hand it's sort of wonderful. There is very little more delightful than snuggling under a Kotatsu in a cool room tucked away from a colder hall. On the flip side, many traditional buildings have interior gardens, which means... your hallways are basically outdoors. When you're heading to the restroom in the middle of the night, it makes it very very clear why the Japanese invented warm toilet seats.
But the cold is also good in facilitating a brisk pace in exploring! I walked incessantly (Kyoto is the outlier Japanese city in that its public transit is fairly limited, so you either take cabs or walk a lot) and visited more temples than I imagined I would have wanted to. This was the major surprise of the trip, and I have some vague theories as to why that was.
Mentally, I'd been comparing Japanese temples to cathedrals in Europe, which made sense: guidebooks described them in similar terms, highlighting works of art on display or ornate features of architecture (more for the latter) and landscape (more for the former). They serve similar purposes as houses of worship. And my assumption had been that I would respond to temples as I usually do to churches in Europe: a certain sense of awe, with somewhat diminishing returns, and eventual exhaustion. (Note: special exemption applies for Sagrada Familia, which I find stunning no matter how many cathedrals I've stuck my head into on the road.)
That didn't happen, and I don't think it's just a question of novelty. I think it's something to do with the intended function of these buildings. Christian buildings are always meant to guide the mind toward divinity, their art and architecture physical manifestations of an underlying spiritual reality. And in a sense, every time you wander through a church as a tourist to look at paintings or frescoes as works of art, you're somewhat misusing the space, like taking a shower in a phone booth. The spaces, especially the more ancient ones you encounter in Europe, were meant to inspire awe, but also to be filled with song, incense, incantations. Participating in a service in these buildings feels categorically different to wandering the aisles and looking for the details your guidebook tells you are significant.
Buddhist temples, at least in my understanding, run quite the opposite direction. It's a central tenet of buddhism as practiced in Japan that you can't intellectualize your way to enlightenment; instead, it arrives through a confrontation with the now, and with moments of discord and contradiction. (Hence Zen koans, and hence the number of Zen teachings that involve a teacher hitting his student with a stick. It's zany!) The idea, as explained to me by a Shingon monk, is that it's not your internal life that matters, nor entirely self-negation, but the traffic between you and the world around you. The aim is to rid oneself of earthly desires and simply be.
Temples work toward that by offering points of contemplation, whether in their painted screens or their rock gardens or their bamboo groves. What's different about this compared to the cathedrals of Europe is the very thing-ness of your environment is what you're meant to be focusing on! It's not a depiction of a Christ-child that's meant to draw you to reflect on Christ's purity and crucifixion, it's a rock in a sea of gravel that you're meant to see as the exact physical object that it is. (Some rock gardens do have articulated ideas behind their arrangement, so who knows, maybe I'm wrong about all of this.) Essentially, as a tourist, if you're reflecting on the age of that piece of stone, of the layers of color bleeding through on the wall, you are engaging with the space as it wants to be seen and understood. And so you do, in my experience, fall into a kind of simple reverie, letting one detail at a time take your attention, whether the way a branch bounces in the wind or the way the snow has cradled a berry on a bough, or simply noticing how warm the sunlight feels as it streams through the open screens. (Again: the cold makes you hyper-cognizant of the warmth!)
In any case, there is a simplicity and un-busy nature to these spaces that I found compelling and engaging, with their subtle differences of emphasis and divergent designs endlessly fascinating. It helps - good lord it helped - to have read Alex Kerr's excellent Another Kyoto before arriving in Japan. This book (my highest recommendation for anyone interested in traditional Japan in their travels) draws out minute details and explicates the long histories and lines of thought that underline the basic building blocks of these temples: walls, gates, flooring, painting. His notion of rock gardens as a kind of three-dimensional iteration of an ink wash painting was revelatory, and his exegesis of the walls at Ryoanji had a direct effect on my love of that place.
(I should also pause to say how fascinating the duality of temple culture is. You can't generalize, truly - some temples are small and ask non-worshipers not to enter; some are strict about prohibiting photography; some are set up for big-bus tour groups, and as I say before, they all have differences that owe to school of buddhism as well as their foundational era. But at the more popular temples, and even in some of the smaller and more local ones, there's a funny coexistence of spaces of contemplation and simplicity and places of frenetic commerce. It's a neat fit for the religious practice itself, which both instructs adherents to forsake earthly desires and sells them fortunes or good-luck trinkets sold under signs reading "For luck on tests" "for luck in love" and so forth. I don't know what to do with that contradiction other than say: hey, lookit! Which is, after all, the theme of this blog.)
So. I'll probably have another post up on Kyoto catching some stray thoughts on food tours, goshuin, advice and the like. But this I suppose is the point I'm getting at: temples are cool, go look at the temples, hooray for temples. What a relief to have this profound and insightful blog back in the world, eh??
In big or business hotels, of course, this isn't the case, but in traditional lodgings, that's still what you'll find, and on the one hand it's sort of wonderful. There is very little more delightful than snuggling under a Kotatsu in a cool room tucked away from a colder hall. On the flip side, many traditional buildings have interior gardens, which means... your hallways are basically outdoors. When you're heading to the restroom in the middle of the night, it makes it very very clear why the Japanese invented warm toilet seats.
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| The Japanese also invented their own tea ceremony, modifying a Chinese one! It's a nice thing to try your first morning in Kyoto, probably! Matcha is extremely good when you don't spray sugar and milk all over it. This has been an episode of Too Many Opinions From Pat! |
Mentally, I'd been comparing Japanese temples to cathedrals in Europe, which made sense: guidebooks described them in similar terms, highlighting works of art on display or ornate features of architecture (more for the latter) and landscape (more for the former). They serve similar purposes as houses of worship. And my assumption had been that I would respond to temples as I usually do to churches in Europe: a certain sense of awe, with somewhat diminishing returns, and eventual exhaustion. (Note: special exemption applies for Sagrada Familia, which I find stunning no matter how many cathedrals I've stuck my head into on the road.)
That didn't happen, and I don't think it's just a question of novelty. I think it's something to do with the intended function of these buildings. Christian buildings are always meant to guide the mind toward divinity, their art and architecture physical manifestations of an underlying spiritual reality. And in a sense, every time you wander through a church as a tourist to look at paintings or frescoes as works of art, you're somewhat misusing the space, like taking a shower in a phone booth. The spaces, especially the more ancient ones you encounter in Europe, were meant to inspire awe, but also to be filled with song, incense, incantations. Participating in a service in these buildings feels categorically different to wandering the aisles and looking for the details your guidebook tells you are significant.
Buddhist temples, at least in my understanding, run quite the opposite direction. It's a central tenet of buddhism as practiced in Japan that you can't intellectualize your way to enlightenment; instead, it arrives through a confrontation with the now, and with moments of discord and contradiction. (Hence Zen koans, and hence the number of Zen teachings that involve a teacher hitting his student with a stick. It's zany!) The idea, as explained to me by a Shingon monk, is that it's not your internal life that matters, nor entirely self-negation, but the traffic between you and the world around you. The aim is to rid oneself of earthly desires and simply be.
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| Part of a sand garden at Ginkakuji, which I found strangely moving! Part of it may be, though I didn't know this at the time, the monks at temples with gardens like these methodically re-rake and re-smooth the sand/gravel/rocks every morning to restore it to the condition established by their designers hundreds of years ago. There's a conflation of old and new that I swear you can feel in a subliminal way. |
In any case, there is a simplicity and un-busy nature to these spaces that I found compelling and engaging, with their subtle differences of emphasis and divergent designs endlessly fascinating. It helps - good lord it helped - to have read Alex Kerr's excellent Another Kyoto before arriving in Japan. This book (my highest recommendation for anyone interested in traditional Japan in their travels) draws out minute details and explicates the long histories and lines of thought that underline the basic building blocks of these temples: walls, gates, flooring, painting. His notion of rock gardens as a kind of three-dimensional iteration of an ink wash painting was revelatory, and his exegesis of the walls at Ryoanji had a direct effect on my love of that place.
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| Daikakuji's moon-viewing platform, once used by nobles and priests for boating as well as contemplation. Being in these places, so meticulously designed and considered, really makes you want to revisit the same places in every season. (And turns out Japanese culture recognizes numerous seasons within seasons, so you'd have lots of prompting to return as nature continues to unfold and reincarnate. |
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| I should probably say something about shinto shrines, and I suppose it's largely that, with the exception of the post-New-Year's frenzy of people practicing Hatsumode (the first shrine visit of the year) from Jan 1-5, it was always wonderful noticing how quiet things got stepping through the Torii gates and into the sacred grounds. I always felt a bit less structured and guided visiting shrines - a bit casual as compared to temples, which I suppose befits their animistic origins and purpose. But I'll tell you what: stumbling across Shinto shrines in the middle of the night, ain't no magic shinier than that. |
