For my wife's birthday, we went to Kyoto and toured at a bunch of temples. This is the third blog post in that series. They are not in any particular order, just the order in which I get to the image files.
We showed up to this one early when the gate was still closed. That's the front door to the temple. It's in a normal part of town across the street from a normal business, next to a normal house. Japan probably has something like zoning laws, but I can't see evidence of them anywhere. I can see why you would want those when you are building a city. One reason is you want to have roads that large trucks can move things down, and you don't want to pay for those large roads everywhere. Japan's solution to that is just have smaller delivery trucks. Another reason is you don't want to have loud noises of businesses bothering people. Japan's solution is to treat people respectfully and accept a certain level of discomfort to keep things peaceful. I can't say for sure that they have entirely avoided the concept of zoning laws, but I don't see any evidence of them. They also avoided some of the corruption that goes along with a central government telling people what they can and can't do in certain areas, and their cities are much more friendly to people walking around. Everywhere I've lived, I could walk to a grocery store, but here, I can also walk to the shopping malls and the train station too.
Nothing really drives home the idea that life is suffering like stairs. There are stairs in all Buddhist temples that I've been to, and this one was no different. It was not the worst, but it wasn't the easiest either. There was a ramp also, I think that's is a nice consideration for people who have trouble walking, but I don't think it was for them, I think it was for the workers who keep the grounds, and that seems a little hypocritical. Something about knowing that the people who are presenting the "life is suffering" temple are driving up and down the hills just doesn't seem right. Maybe they are not true believers, just people doing a job.
At the top of the hill is a shrine. It's done up the typical Buddhist Temple Brown. I don't feel like the picket stone fence fits in with the aethetic, but it's not my temple. The white picket fence is also a cultural touchstone from my native culture, not from the local culture, so it probably feels different to people here.
There is a pretty good view from the top of the hill. You can kinda see it on the right hand side, there was a large area that had been cleared of trees, which is why that area had such a clear view. I don't know why they were clearing that area out. It looked like there had been a landside of some sort, but I thought that clearing trees made that problem worse. Maybe they wanted more land to expand building on.
Bells are a common element at Buddhist Temples, and you are allowed to ring them. I think that's really cool, I don't know if other cultures have more fragile bells, or if Buddhists embrace the non-permance of all things (spoiler warning, they do) and so they don't care if you break things. I'm sure they do care, but they know that stuff gets broken, so they have preparations for that. Or maybe they trust people not to break things. Or maybe they build stuff to resist being broken. They sound exactly like you think they sound like, if you have ever heard a bell like that before.
There are statues like this all over Japan. I have no idea what any of them are. Many have placards in Japanese, so that's not crazy helpful. Some don't have placards at all, or at least none that I can find. I think that's odd, unless this is a person so famous that I'm supposed to know who it is. I feel like there is a U-shapde graph on that: If a person is really obscure, there will be a label that tells you who they are because no one knows. If they are a little more famous, they might not have one, but if they are super famous, there will be another placard. I guess that's how the person got super famous, by having placards made of them, and the people in the middle didn't have placards, so they didn't get famous.
SarisonZero lives and works in Japan. He recently hit the one year mark of living here, and doesn't remember if he mentioned that or not.