Kyoto Part I: Kinkakuji and Ryoanji

After our week-long stay in Nara, it was time to bid goodbye to my favorite city and so we boarded the train at the JR (Japan Railways) Nara Station and rode the Kintetsu Kyoto Line for a little under an hour before arriving at Kyoto Station. From this point, things get slightly hazy. For someone seeing it for the first time, Kyoto Station is almost as confusing as Shinjuku and is one of the largest stations in the country. I doubt I could retrace the exact steps after disembarking from the train as I simply followed our herd of foreigners as we were shepherded by our professor to the busses out front of the station.

We would not be getting into our hostel until much later that evening and our itinerary called for a rather full day of sight-seeing. While Nara most certainly has my heart, Kyoto is by no means a second-rate city. Kyoto is a city steeped in a rich cultural history and is probably the most popular tourist destination, second, perhaps, to Tokyo. My professor, Martin Holman, who had lived in Kyoto for nearly a decade, said, "You could live in Kyoto for 10 years, as I have, and still not have seen all there is to see or do all there is to do."

After spending a week living in the city and visiting Kyoto multiple times throughout my tenure in Japan, I couldn't agree more with my professor's assessment. I still have quite an extensive list of places to visit in Kyoto that I don't know if I'll ever be able to complete it. My professor has lived in Japan off and on for 30-plus years and if he is any indication, Kyoto might just be too big a city to ever conquer completely.

Our first stop in Kyoto was a visit to Kinkakuji on the North side of the city. Also known as the "Temple of the Golden Pavilion," Kinkakuji is a Zen Buddhist temple founded in 1397. The current temple, the entire structure of which shines in gilded radiance, is actually a reconstruction of the original built in 1955. The original temple was burned to the ground in 1950 by a mentally-addled novice monk, who then unsuccessfully attempted suicide on the hill behind the temple. The gilded leaves that cover the temple stem from the Muromachi period as a symbol to ward off pollution and negativity. Words cannot express the beauty that has been captured on the grounds of the Kinkakuji complex. The Temple sits on a small, picturesque pond dotted with islands and trees in the middle of a Buddhist garden.

After completely exploring the temple grounds, or at least as far as we were able, we left Kinkakuji and boarded the bus bound for our next sight-seeing spot, the Zen Buddhist temple, Ryoanji. While both places are famous Zen sites, Ryoanji is particularly famous for its painstakingly cultivated garden and the rock meditation garden in the center of the complex. As we did, one could spend hours taking in the elegance and serenity of the garden. We followed the lead of other Japanese people we saw in the temple and spoke only in a hushed whisper so as not to disturb the halcyon scene. I felt, as did many of my companions, a real sense of inner-peace as we were afforded the opportunity to meditate in the temple and explore the grounds.

While Kinkakuji and Ryoanji should most certainly be on the top of everyone's list of places to see while in Kyoto, these two stops were only the first half our first day in Kyoto. In next week's post I will share with you one of Japan's greatest treasures for the food-savvy, as well as share the horror story that was our first visit to the Fushimi Inari Shrine, popularized by the movie Memoirs of a Geisha.

Useful phrase in this week's post:

Kinkakuji - きんかくじ - 金閣寺

meaning: Temple of the Golden Pavilion