Kyoto...Again

Toji Pagoda, a photo by dtk_guy on Flickr.

Day one of my February vacation: I arrived in Kyoto anticipating meeting up with my mom and her travel companions. While I was in transit between Tokyo and Kyoto I received a message on my phone from Rev. Aoki advising me that the group's arrival would be delayed by at least two hours. As it turned out they arrived about three hours late. Thus they had spent close to 25 hours on the Twilight Express train for their trip from Sapporo to Kyoto.

On the other hand I had woken up to what was more or less blizzard conditions in Yonezawa. The taxi trip to the station was highlighted by the site of a man braving the elements while riding his bicycle. This was prior to 7am in the morning too. Takes all sorts to make the world go around I suppose. Aside from that the trip to Kyoto was relatively uneventful. I first caught sight of Mt. Fuji from the train somewhere south of Utsunomiya. In spite of the fact that it's "just there" I always seem to attach a bit of importance to each time I catch sight of Japan's most famous mountain.

Given that I had time to kill in Kyoto I picked a nearby location to visit. My destination was Toji, a temple whose five story pagoda I've seen from trains in the past but never gotten around to visiting.

In the literature one receives when entering the central compound of the temple is the statement which partly reads as "The body is Koya, the heart is Toji". I presume "Koya" is Koyasan, the mountain top headquarters of the Shingon sect of Buddhism. Toji, which houses many artistic treasures of Esoteric Buddhism, was passed to Kukai (posthumously known as Kobo Daishi) around 824AD. He had the temple expanded and made it the central seminar of the Shingon sect.

One amazing thing about the collection of Buddhist art and statues at Toji is the simple fact that it exists. The main buildings of the temple seem to have all been destroyed at least once by one form or another of natural disasters in the history of the site. The pagoda which had caught my eye was rebuilt in 1644. Given that some of the statues were imported from China then one can get a feel for the immense cultural value of the collection.

Being a member of a Buddhist sect which generally only features one Buddha in each temple, visiting a Shingon sect temple can be a bewildering experience. There can be a sizable contingent of Buddhas and gods housed in some sites. Sorting them all out when you're not versed in the background of Shingon can be quite a challenge.

The rest of the day was straight forward: meeting up with the rest of the group, having dinner, helping my mom unload the things she had brought over for me and getting to bed early in preparation for an early start the next day...6am service at the Nishi Hongwanji.