(I'm consolidating observations of/thoughts on the sacred sites we've visited into one post, because at last count we've visited two Shinto shrines and at least ten Buddhist temples.)
Kyoto is a god-ridden city. The streets are filled with shrines, from the neon orange Chinese architecture of the Heian Jingu Shinto shrine to the street altars no bigger than a shoebox, each with its own stick of incense and sake in a cheap bright cup. What shocks people initially about the little shrines and the god shelves is their decorative patterns of swastikas: the flat-armed version from ancient India rather than the Nazi Hakenkreuz dangling menacingly on one point. What surprises them is that the shelves and shrines house no gods. Often there's no image inside - where an equivalent Christian altar might house a statuette of a saint or a picture of Jesus, the street shrines have only flowers, or a small torii gate, or sacred paper strips. These altars are Shinto and the gods they honour are pantheistic: the god is not a human figure (not the god of the street) but the god who is the street, the god who is the tarmac and the girders and the gears of the bicycle leaning against the barrel full of pickled radish, which is itself the god.
Shinto is one of the indigenous religions of Japan (the beliefs of the Ainu, Ezo, Michihase, and Ebisu not getting much of a look-in). It is pantheistic, believing that divine spirits reside within all things, with some natural phenomena having particularly famous or important gods - this applies mostly to mountains, like Hieizan in Kyoto and Iwakisan in Tohoku. The earliest collection of religious texts pertaining to Shintoism is the early medieval Kojiki ['The Record of Ancient Matters']. To make matters slightly confusing, Shintoism is both pantheistic and polytheistic in that there's also a pantheon of anthropomorphic deities. The first two humanoid gods, says the Kojiki, were Izanami and her brother Izanagi. Together they had multiple children: their first attempt at having children was a disaster, because Izanami spoke before her brother did. The resultant offspring was so hideous that it was called the Leech Child, promptly put into a basket, and pushed off into the ocean, never to be mentioned again. Hurrah for the patriarchy. Eventually the gods had several children, including Amaterasu Omikami (the Heaven-Shining Great Sun Goddess) and her brother Susano (a merry prankster who enjoyed such shenanigans as painting her throne room with horseshit and skinning some horses, then making their flayed bodies dance around her palace. Early Japanese mythology is...very. It's extremely very). The Emperors of Japan historically claimed direct descent from Amaterasu Omikami; the bond between Shintoism and the Imperial Family was condensed in the 1930s and 40s into what's known as 'state Shinto' or 'wartime Shinto' - now, of course, obsolete.
For some idea of what state Shinto was like, Yukio Mishima's novel Wild Horses (Honda in Japanese) gives an excellent impression. Mainly because Mishima was a committed and enthusiastic Shinto nationalist. His characters fervently denounce Buddhism as an imported, foreign, and therefore 'un-Japanese' faith. (Somewhere, the ghost of Nichiren - ultra-militant medieval Buddhist monk - is laughing very, very bitterly.) Buddhism is in fact not native to Japan: it arrived from China via Korea in the 6th century CE and was promptly embraced alongside Shintoism. The two faiths essentially dovetail - Buddhism has little interest in birth and wedding rituals and Shintosm sees death as dirty and ritually impure, hence the popular Japanese truism that one is 'born Shinto and dies Buddhist'. Hieizan is the perfect example: great and venerable Buddhist temples are built on the mountain which is a god.
I am personally a Buddhist (Jodo Shinshu / True Pure Land School sect), but Buddhism here is less concerned with existential belief than with modes of practice, as is Shinto. Cleanliness is not next to godliness in Shintoism. It's better than godliness. All visitors to Shinto shrines are required to rinse their hands and mouths before entering; both faiths believe that divine attention can be attracted by ringing a bell. The bellrope at Nasaka Shine, dedicated to the shit-stirring god Susano, is as thick around as my arm, but the bell's rattle is suprisingly tinny and high-pitched. The bell at Kinkakuji, the Temple of the Golden Pavilion (another Mishima novel...), sounds listless and irritable like a sick person coughing. Only the big bell of Enryakuji Temple on Hieizan, where worshippers slam a heavy wooden battering beam into the side of the bell, gave a sonorous noise.
Many of the temples we visited were ancient and venerable - Ryoanji with its Zen garden, Kiyomizu-dera with its clearwater spring, Ginkakuji with its teahouse - but my two favourites so far have been Kenniji and Gio-ji. Kenniji is in northern central Kyoto: it's a Soto Zen temple which contains a rumpled, unshakeable sense of peace. The engawa (wooden walkways and verandahs) have been dulled into a greyish brown colour and smoothed to matte softness by worshippers' feet. Its tatami floors are comfortably mouse-coloured rather than grand and gold; its most impressive feature is its fractal architecture, where a brief glance though a doorway gives you a glimpse of more corridors branching out like a Zen TARDIS, all giving the impression of an organic system bigger than what can be seen.
The other temple, Gio-ji, is what gives this blog post its name. It's less of a temple and more of a two-room hut in the depths of the Arashiyama bamboo forest, about thirty minutes' mountain-hike from the train station. We went there on the hottest day we've yet spent in Kyoto. Outside the hut, there are five Buddhist graves: inside, there are devotional statues of four women and the Buddha, a small prayer bowl, and some seats for worshippers. This was the temple sacred to the memory of Lady Gio. She appears in the Heike Monogatari as a dancer who became the mistress of the aristocratic megalomaniac Taira no Kiyomori; after three years, he cast her aside in favour of a younger dancer who had cone to his attention through Lady Gio's own kindness. She spent a year in humiliation before being summoned back to the palace in order to entertain Kiyomori and the girl who had replaced him. Unable to bear this insult, and quite rightly too, she (along with her younger sister Ginjo, their mother, and eventually Kiyomori's other mistress) renounced the world and became Buddhist nuns in this isolated two-room hut. I saw no ghosts but the women have not left; in the Buddhist sense, and in the context of what happened to the rest of the Heike, they - like Mishima's Gesshu Abbess - lived happily ever after in the end.
Kyoto is a god-ridden city. The streets are filled with shrines, from the neon orange Chinese architecture of the Heian Jingu Shinto shrine to the street altars no bigger than a shoebox, each with its own stick of incense and sake in a cheap bright cup. What shocks people initially about the little shrines and the god shelves is their decorative patterns of swastikas: the flat-armed version from ancient India rather than the Nazi Hakenkreuz dangling menacingly on one point. What surprises them is that the shelves and shrines house no gods. Often there's no image inside - where an equivalent Christian altar might house a statuette of a saint or a picture of Jesus, the street shrines have only flowers, or a small torii gate, or sacred paper strips. These altars are Shinto and the gods they honour are pantheistic: the god is not a human figure (not the god of the street) but the god who is the street, the god who is the tarmac and the girders and the gears of the bicycle leaning against the barrel full of pickled radish, which is itself the god.
Shinto is one of the indigenous religions of Japan (the beliefs of the Ainu, Ezo, Michihase, and Ebisu not getting much of a look-in). It is pantheistic, believing that divine spirits reside within all things, with some natural phenomena having particularly famous or important gods - this applies mostly to mountains, like Hieizan in Kyoto and Iwakisan in Tohoku. The earliest collection of religious texts pertaining to Shintoism is the early medieval Kojiki ['The Record of Ancient Matters']. To make matters slightly confusing, Shintoism is both pantheistic and polytheistic in that there's also a pantheon of anthropomorphic deities. The first two humanoid gods, says the Kojiki, were Izanami and her brother Izanagi. Together they had multiple children: their first attempt at having children was a disaster, because Izanami spoke before her brother did. The resultant offspring was so hideous that it was called the Leech Child, promptly put into a basket, and pushed off into the ocean, never to be mentioned again. Hurrah for the patriarchy. Eventually the gods had several children, including Amaterasu Omikami (the Heaven-Shining Great Sun Goddess) and her brother Susano (a merry prankster who enjoyed such shenanigans as painting her throne room with horseshit and skinning some horses, then making their flayed bodies dance around her palace. Early Japanese mythology is...very. It's extremely very). The Emperors of Japan historically claimed direct descent from Amaterasu Omikami; the bond between Shintoism and the Imperial Family was condensed in the 1930s and 40s into what's known as 'state Shinto' or 'wartime Shinto' - now, of course, obsolete.
For some idea of what state Shinto was like, Yukio Mishima's novel Wild Horses (Honda in Japanese) gives an excellent impression. Mainly because Mishima was a committed and enthusiastic Shinto nationalist. His characters fervently denounce Buddhism as an imported, foreign, and therefore 'un-Japanese' faith. (Somewhere, the ghost of Nichiren - ultra-militant medieval Buddhist monk - is laughing very, very bitterly.) Buddhism is in fact not native to Japan: it arrived from China via Korea in the 6th century CE and was promptly embraced alongside Shintoism. The two faiths essentially dovetail - Buddhism has little interest in birth and wedding rituals and Shintosm sees death as dirty and ritually impure, hence the popular Japanese truism that one is 'born Shinto and dies Buddhist'. Hieizan is the perfect example: great and venerable Buddhist temples are built on the mountain which is a god.
I am personally a Buddhist (Jodo Shinshu / True Pure Land School sect), but Buddhism here is less concerned with existential belief than with modes of practice, as is Shinto. Cleanliness is not next to godliness in Shintoism. It's better than godliness. All visitors to Shinto shrines are required to rinse their hands and mouths before entering; both faiths believe that divine attention can be attracted by ringing a bell. The bellrope at Nasaka Shine, dedicated to the shit-stirring god Susano, is as thick around as my arm, but the bell's rattle is suprisingly tinny and high-pitched. The bell at Kinkakuji, the Temple of the Golden Pavilion (another Mishima novel...), sounds listless and irritable like a sick person coughing. Only the big bell of Enryakuji Temple on Hieizan, where worshippers slam a heavy wooden battering beam into the side of the bell, gave a sonorous noise.
Many of the temples we visited were ancient and venerable - Ryoanji with its Zen garden, Kiyomizu-dera with its clearwater spring, Ginkakuji with its teahouse - but my two favourites so far have been Kenniji and Gio-ji. Kenniji is in northern central Kyoto: it's a Soto Zen temple which contains a rumpled, unshakeable sense of peace. The engawa (wooden walkways and verandahs) have been dulled into a greyish brown colour and smoothed to matte softness by worshippers' feet. Its tatami floors are comfortably mouse-coloured rather than grand and gold; its most impressive feature is its fractal architecture, where a brief glance though a doorway gives you a glimpse of more corridors branching out like a Zen TARDIS, all giving the impression of an organic system bigger than what can be seen.
The other temple, Gio-ji, is what gives this blog post its name. It's less of a temple and more of a two-room hut in the depths of the Arashiyama bamboo forest, about thirty minutes' mountain-hike from the train station. We went there on the hottest day we've yet spent in Kyoto. Outside the hut, there are five Buddhist graves: inside, there are devotional statues of four women and the Buddha, a small prayer bowl, and some seats for worshippers. This was the temple sacred to the memory of Lady Gio. She appears in the Heike Monogatari as a dancer who became the mistress of the aristocratic megalomaniac Taira no Kiyomori; after three years, he cast her aside in favour of a younger dancer who had cone to his attention through Lady Gio's own kindness. She spent a year in humiliation before being summoned back to the palace in order to entertain Kiyomori and the girl who had replaced him. Unable to bear this insult, and quite rightly too, she (along with her younger sister Ginjo, their mother, and eventually Kiyomori's other mistress) renounced the world and became Buddhist nuns in this isolated two-room hut. I saw no ghosts but the women have not left; in the Buddhist sense, and in the context of what happened to the rest of the Heike, they - like Mishima's Gesshu Abbess - lived happily ever after in the end.
