Kinkakuji Temple

Kinkaku, the Golden Pavilion, is a symbol of Kyoto. This place is always crowded with tourists. This is also one of seventeen World Heritage sites in Kyoto.

This temple is formally named Rokuon-ji Temple, but commonly called Kinkaku-ji Temple. In 1397, Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, the 3^rd shogun of the Muromachi period, acquired this area from a statesman, and built his own villa at this place. He named the villa Kitayama-den. It is said that the garden and buildings represent the Pure Land of Buddha in this world.

To avoid the crowd, I visited there before the opening time. Unfortunately, however, there were already a lot of tourists and students waiting for the gates to be opened.

The colour of leaves was just nice and beautiful, so people were taking pictures of them happily. After a while, the gate was finally opened and the crowd suddenly moved into the temple.

The entry ticket was 400 yen, which was quite reasonable. I like their ticket because it is shaped like an amulet. Then, we finally saw the Golden Pavilion!

Most of the tourists were screaming in joy when they saw the building, and it was quite funny hearing the exclamations. The golden structure is a Buddhist hall, called Shariden, enshrining a fragment of bone from Buddha. This building was destroyed by arson in 1950, and the one we can see now dates from 1955. A shining phoenix stands on the top of the roof. The place was really crowded and guards were encouraging people not to stop. I could not believe that it was still 9 am!

Besides the Golden Pavilion, there were other nice spots in the temple, too. For example, this great pine tree is named “Riku-fune no matsu,” meaning a boat landing on the shore.

 

Also, this is a tea house, named Sekka-tei. It was built during the Edo period.

 

They had paper fortunes written in foreign languages, such as English, Chinese, and Korean.