Temples, Shrines & Maiko

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Day 12 (Sunday): New photos added to the Kyoto album here. As is only fitting for a Sunday, today was the Day of Temples and Shrines. And, oddly, maiko — that is, geishas-in-training.

We started out visiting Sanjyusangendo (Buddhist), an immense long hall famed for its 1,001 gold-painted statues of Kannon. I had flashbacks to the “100 Buddhas” my sister and I inherited from our mother — statue after statue after statue. Nevertheless, it’s an extremely striking hall, with a priest in the center kneeling before an altar, chanting prayers. The statues of the twelve guardian deities that stood in front were particularly interesting because I’d seen several of the same deities already in India, so I could compare the Indian and Japanese versions of Shiva, Lakshmi, Garuda, and so forth. No photographs were allowed, unfortunately.

Then off to the Otani Mausoleum, something that I, taphophile that I am, had been looking forward to. It’s a mountainside full of shrines, old and new, that stretch on forever. Graveyards have always fascinated me; there’s something about looking around at all those forgotten or soon-to-be-forgotten lives that reminds me that my life is only a tiny little moment in the universe’s history. On the one hand, such a memento mori keeps me humble, and on the other, it inspires me to try to all I can with this split-second of infinity that I’ve been granted, and not to fret too much about my mistakes.

We also visited the Kiyomizu temple, where we saw many people dressed up in their kimonos and one probably real maiko with an older woman watching over her. Kiyomizu is a fun, crowded complex that features very pure water one can scoop with a silver ladle and drink, if one cares to stand in a long line…. Then we saw Jishu shrine and Sannennzaka, had a bento lunch, rushed over to see a special demonstration of two maiko dancing at the Kyoto Museum of Traditional Handicrafts, then Yasaka shrine, and the Heian shrine. We walked through Gion, the “geisha quarter” of Kyoto, to get to dinner, but we didn’t see any maiko or geisha there — I suppose that by then, they were all starting work.

drupagliassotti @ May 30, 2010