Sennyu-ji

Many temples are on heights. Some, like the Chion-in, require a degree of perseverance to reach. These, like the Parthenon, demand an effort: you are expected to deserve, you earn your exhilaration.

Sennyu-ji, however, is in a valley and from the gate one strolls down the graveled incline to the main hall below. Above is Mount Tsukinowa in the Higashiyama hills, and beyond are the slopes which lead to the Uji River. The pilgrim is in a valley and rolls naturally as ball to stop in front of the great Buddha hall.

The descent into Sennyu-ji seems to fit the secluded nature of the place. It is certainly not a temple like Enryaku-ji which one associates with strenuous heights. Rather, it is a place of quiet contemplation and of rest.

Imperial rest—for emperors are entombed here. Several have left behind a poem or two which reflect the sad history of the later imperial house. The emperor Go-Mizunoo expressed his indignation toward the Kamakura shogunate which so abrogated his authority, comparing the government to those common reeds which impeded the river's natural flow.

Some centuries later the emperor Komei felt the same way about a new set of shoguns, those in Edo (now Tokyo) on the plain of Musashi. Like the useless reeds upon this plain, the rulers up in Edo bowed this way and that, strong but showing how little this strength could be trusted.

Such imperial poetry had, of course, no political influence at all, but the quiet seclusion in which it was written, and by which it was perhaps inspired, remains. Though Sennyu-ji is Shingon, a sect not noted for repose, its attractive air of resignation is one of reasons (along with difficulty of access) that there are few visitors and none of the hoopla of popular places such as the Chion-in and Hongan-ji to the east and west.

The temple was founded late, in 1218, after the disastrous Minamoto and Taira wars, thus well after the onset of the degenerate age of mappo and long after it had been discovered that this world is indeed a vale of tears.

The priest Shunjo (later known as Gachirin Daishi) indicated this in his Sennyu-ji Kannenso, a document—now a national treasure—which is still kept in the temple. In it he stresses the need for some kind of spiritual guide in those troubled times. "Life and death are, it seems, the same. The cycle of being and non-being is unending—only devotion can attest to your own realization."

He intended his temple to be a seminary for the study of the tenets of all Buddhist sects. Thus spared the direct enmity of Tendai, he was able from the first to ask for imperial aid. His request was granted. The cloistered emperor Go-Toba and his son, reigning-emperor Go-Takakura both donated ten thousand rolls of woven silk which, when sold, raised a considerable amount of money.

Imperial interest insured, it was perhaps natural that the place became the mausoleum for the royal remains, particularly in those later years, when no one wanted them.

One looks at the portraits of the emperors, the full, haughty, blank gazes, all caught in the lineaments of formula, and one senses the common combination of power and pride. The gaze is frontal, from above—one is regarded, but merely that. All of which makes these no different from imperials portraits anywhere.

If one fills in the details, from this chronicle or that history, however, a different caste is lent them. One senses first a kind of fusty, indecisive, bureaucratic motion, a puttering which seems to dither. The singular lack of the pomp of imperial Europe becomes noticeable.

Emperors increasingly wander about their temple-palaces, keep little birds, tend their vegetables, stamp papers, dress up and pose for hours at a time. They play ball in the garden, go boating on the lake, and—of course—stop before they begin. No sooner grown, they are put out to rusticate. Encloistered they write poetry or try to pull strings from behind the arras, or both.

The appearance of an open imperial power is not among those illusions sustained by Japanese history. And consequently, the little hand of the boy emperor seems more human than does the glove of the stuffed kings of England or the manly grasp of the life-sized wax figures of the presidents of the United States.

Also, another reason for this attractive melancholy, is that most of these men lived in the age of mappo. To do this was to believe in the grand disaster of the summer sunset and yet to doubt each dawn. It was a time when death and destruction bought submission but promise was held in distrust. This time of easy desperation meant that misfortune was endured or entertained with a resigned satisfaction.

Death brought certainty as birth brought doubt. And history itself became a chronicle of mere misfortune. The arts, like leaves in autumn, turned elegiac, and earlier Tang-flavored Heian times were now viewed as an innocent age of gold when, in the mists of endless summer afternoons, life had been more beautiful because it was further away.

Even the chronicles of Sennyu-ji show some of this longed-for vagueness, this clouded craving for a placid past. The temple believes that it was originally a rustic place founded (as was so much else) by Kobo Daishi, formerly the priest Kukai who brought the Shingon faith from China. At the same timer-brought back by the priest Tankai—was what was once billed as the main treasure of the place: a tooth of the Buddha.

Like the relics of the saints, scattered around Europe, the teeth of the Buddha are distributed around Asia. The main temple in Rangoon is supposed to have one and the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy advertises a like possession.

The tooth at Sennyu-ji, however, is now tucked away and none of the literature mentions it. Having heard of its existence, however, I went to the temple office on a cool late summer afternoon and asked where it was.

The priest did not seem embarrassed by this somewhat garish relic—dental records in the halls of the dead imperials—and merely said that it was in the shariden, the reliquary. I asked it if were really there and he civilly replied that it was safely immured and so there is no telling whether it is there or not.

Satisfied, I walked slowly up the slope as the sun declined and the cicadas finally stopped. Tooth or none, equally precious, certainly, is the sense of quiet space in these temple yards.

The buildings, with the naturalness of rocks or trees, silently punctuate the air, and I am reminded of Kuko Shuzo's remark that Japanese sculpture and architecture are both characterized by "a taste for simplicity and fluidity [which] arises from nostalgia for the infinite and from the effort to efface differences in space," so that "the distant mountain is often nearer than the trees beside us."