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KYOTO - The city of temples
Kinkaku-ji - is the popular name of the Temple of the Golden Pavilion. The elegant, harmonious building consists of 3 types of architecture. The palace style(1st floor), Samurai-style(2nd floor) and the zen-temple style (3rd floor). The 2nd and 3rd floor are covered with gold-leaf on Japanese Laquer. The pond which reflects the image of the temple is aptly named as Kyooko-chi (mirror pond).
Kokedera - This is a zen temple. This is surrounded by a beautiful moss garden covered with over 120 kinds of moss. It has a pond shaped like a chinese character 'shin' which means heart.
In most of the Japanese temples there are famous for their Gardens. These may appear to have origin in the original buddhist monasteries, to represent the "vihara" in which the buddhist monks used to dwell. It is said that these gardens originated when the noble people of Japan started to travel more widely and saw more of the world, and marveled at the nature. They then tried to recreate the memories of sea and mountains in the gardens they created adjacent to their villas and temples. Some of these villas were later converted into temples.
Most of these gardens are truly beautiful. I'd like to write more about the Moss Garden of Saiho-ji , a Zen Buddhism temple, in the west of Kyoto. This was once the villa of a prince and later (around AD 729-749) a priest erected a temple here to enshrine 3 images representing 'Amitabha Divinities'. This temple does not allow visitors just for sightseeing. It is compulsory to take part in the prayer ceremony, by giving a an offering of at last yen 3K, for which one has to first obtain an appointment by writing much in advance.
The prayer meeting in this temple was a unique experience. We were given some papers on which was written some kind of verses in Kanji (Chinese characters). The sounds associated with this script was written by the side of each character in Kana (the phonetic script of Japan). We do not yet know the meaning of these verses, but their chanting created a mesmerizing effect. Along with these was given (and which is a standard practice) a wooden strip. On this strip you write your wish and offer it to the god after the prayers.