Kinkaku-ji

se_0.0

Mishima Yukio's 'The Temple of the Golden Pavilion' starts with the line, 'From my childhood, my father often told me stories about the Golden Pavilion.' Just as the 'Golden Pavilion' is mentioned in the title and in its critically acclaimed opening line, the Golden Pavilion in this novel carries various symbols and is described very delicately. 'The Golden Pavilion, with a water-cleansing wooden corridor on the west and an unusually slender viewing pavilion on the second floor, was an unbalanced yet delicate building that performed a function similar to a filter, turning muddy water into clear. The noise made by people, rather than being rejected by the Golden Pavilion, seeped in between the columns where the wind passed smoothly, and eventually filtered into a silence, a chime. Thus, the Golden Pavilion was realizing on earth the same appearance as the unshaken reflection in the pond at some moments.' This is a part of how the Golden Pavilion is depicted in the novel. After visiting Kyoto, encountering the Golden Pavilion there, and then reading this novel was a great experience for me, although it wasn’t a trip made out of an inability to contain the emotions stirred by reading the book. Originally built as a villa to flaunt the status of Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, the third shogun of the Muromachi period, it was his son who converted it into a Zen Buddhism temple. The temple faced several fires through the Onin War in 1467 and was largely destroyed by an arson committed by one of the temple's monks suffering from mental illness in 1950. It was reconstructed in 1955, and this arson incident provided the backdrop for the novel 'The Temple of the Golden Pavilion' I mentioned earlier. As a Zen Buddhism temple, it served as a hall housing the Buddhas and the relics of past Zen masters. Excluding the ground floor, which touches water, the second and third floors are covered with gold leaf to express the symbolic color of Buddhism while flaunting the power of Ashikaga Yoshimitsu with its glistening decorations, and there's a golden phoenix on the roof. It originally had the name 'Rokuon-ji,' but as the gold-leafed section became known as 'Golden Pavilion,' it started being called by that name.