Kiyomizu-dera

Once much larger, Kiyomizu-dera now consists of a modest seven halls, a three-story pagoda, and several minor buildings. The main hall, however, remains anything but modest—it is one of the most spectacular structures in all Kyoto—and it opens onto an enormous verandah built out over a cliff which offers a spacious view of what is left of the skyline, and itself presents the most distinct ecclesiastical profile in the capital.

The temple, given its spectacular presence, its lofty bastions, and its general eminence, was early known as the "Mountain" and a recent abbot, Ryokei Onishi (1876-1983) was still saying, at the age of 107, "When you climb this Mountain, you are approaching the Buddha. And if you come every day, you draw even nearer."

Kyomizu-dera was originally intended, with its many pillars, its open space, and its splendid view, to represent Kannon's southern paradise—or did before the view was ruined by the cheap impertinence of Kyoto Tower, as distinguished from the expensive impertinence of, say, the nearby Nijo Casde.

Like Amida's western paradise, represented in the Byodo-in and elsewhere, this paradise of Kannon was an idealization of the world to come. A land of flowering trees, cooling waters, this idea of a future paradise came perhaps from some dim memory of the royal pleasure gardens of the Near East which had earlier inspired the garden complexes of the Tang Palace. Certainly, the artificial paradises of Japan followed this Chinese scheme and in these versions the imperial park came to mirror on earth the beauty of a celestial future.

Kiyomizu-dera suggests that paradisical ideal though a oneness with the landscape it occupies. The great cypress-shingled roofs are continuations of the cryptomeria-covered hills and the verandah is a huge cave in the side of this manmade mountain. If Amida's paradise is a celestial palace, Kannon's here is a heavenly hall animated by nature itself. If a visit to any temple is often like a stroll through a grove—all of these wooden pillars, the leafy overhead of panels and paintings—it is here a journey through an entire ecclesiastical forest.

Below this pillared esplanade is the Otowa no Taki, the Sound-of-Feathers Waterfall and believers like to refer to it as the original source of the kiyomizu (pure water), its presumed soundlessness being but one of its miraculous qualities. It is to be drunk from long-handled cups, and those who stand under its icy stream become even more purified.

From here the path leads up a small hill to tiny Taiza-ji. While the temple is undistinguished, the view is unsurpassed. Here, across the small valley, rears the entire complex of Kiyomizu-dera. It is like a city, saddled across the ridge, roof after roof, the view commanded by the great hall and its enormous esplanade, the visitors now mere dots of color in the vastness.

Architect Ashihara Yoshinobu has noted that Japanese architecture is only rarely to be viewed from afar, that the mass outline so important to the effect of Western architecture is not often present in traditional Japanese buildings. Architecture viewed from far off emphasizes the whole exterior, that to be seen from closer emphasizes texture and detail.

He also emphasizes the difference between exterior (outside) and interior (inside). The latter he feels is the more Japanese, for in the matter of form and content the Japanese are interested in content (the inside) and the classical West in form (the outside). This is true and Kiyomizu-dera is the exception that proves it.

But observing form, architecturally or otherwise, is also a way of seeing universality, a manner of regarding essence, the timeless, the invariable. It leads to introspection.

"The only sightseers left on the verandah of the temple were a few girl students, but their faces were not clearly visible. This was the hour Chieko had come to prefer. Votive candles were burning in the dark recesses... the verandah was built overhanging a cliff. Like the light, buoyant bark roof, the verandah, too, appeared to be delicately suspended... Chieko leaned against the railing and gazed toward the West. She spoke abruptly:'Shin'ichi, I was an abandoned child, a foundling.'"

Thus the heroine of Yasunari Kawabata's 1962 The Old Capital finds in Kiyomizu-dera the strength to tell' her secret. And in the penultimate sequence of Ozu's 1949 Late, Spring, father and daughter make their last trip together to Kyoto and stand on the great porch, differences forgotten, lost in the peace of perfect space.

Legend says that long ago the wandering ascetic monk Enchin one day arrived in the hills of Higashiyama, to the west of the plain on which the capital was to rise. There he met a devout follower of the goddess Kannon named Gyoei, who had a dwelling next to a small waterfall. Invited in, the monk stayed and made himself useful.

Kannon was, of course, already there. The Buddhist hierarchy begins with the Buddha himself in all of his various aspects—Amida, et al., then these manifestations are subdivided as we have seen into bosatsu (bodhisattva), compassionate beings who postpone their own nirvana in order to save those still living. Since they are the ones who do all the work they are commonly portrayed as standing or even flying. As attendant to the Buddha, Kannon herself was an early visitor to Japan—she was already at Ishiyama-dera. A bodhisattva, she attends the Buddha in his Amida manifestation.

Kannon is thus seen as the personification of infinite compassion. Indeed, her name so indicates this quality: Kannon—Guan'yin in Chinese—is taken to mean "the one who hears all cries." Originally male in India and known as Avalokitesvara, Kannon's gentler changed at some time during her long history. Being a man, however, was just one of her incarnations. The Lotus Sutra says that she has thirty-three of them. Still, the female form has been perceived as most fitting.

Also, Kannon is attendant to the Amida and can thus provide protection during the present life and help in transporting the faithful to Amida's Pure Land after death. She was from early on an important and popular deity.

Much of this information was doubdess included in a sermon which Gyoei delivered to a passing officer, Sakanoue no Tamuramaro. This military man went on up the mountain after that and successfully accomplished his mission of capturing some local bandits. Sakanoue came to the conclusion that this success was resultant of the sermon—or at least this is the decision that he comes to in the Noh drama Tamura.

In any event grateful, he had a small temple built for Gyoei and Enchin which they named after the waterfall, the Temple of Clear Water, Kiyomizudera. This event is now dated as having occurred in 788—some six years before Kyoto itself was founded.

Soon afterward, a newly made image of Kannon (impressive and all inclusive—it is said to have had eleven faces, a thousand arms, and a thousand eyes) was in place and the temple was in business. But Gyoei had mysteriously vanished. It was then that Enchin discovered that the now absent priest had really been a manifestation of the androgynous Kannon herself. This led to a suitable number of pilgrims, and by 804 the emperor Kammu had made this special temple a large grant of land.

He also, having moved to the new capital, gave the monk Enchin and his military patron the old imperial shishin-den. This enormous throne room was moved to the sacred precincts where it served as the main hall. As Bruno Taut noted, temples are really homes (and a throne room is part of a home), somewhere to put the deity. And it was here that Kannon made herself so comfortable that when private ownership of temples was prohibited in 810—a late attempt to stem priestly influence—Kiyomizu-dera was already an important religious center.

The religion was Hosso, that sect of Amiditic Buddhism devoted to the worship of Kannon. The name comes from the character for dharma. This quality cannot be explained but, as one early priest put it, "We cannot see air, but when it becomes cold, rain turns to snow: this is dharma. Basic laws (ho) are thus given form (so)"

The few remaining Hosso temples were Horyu-ji, Yakushi-ji, and Kofukuji—all in Nara. Kiyomizu-dera enjoyed brotherly (or sisterly) relations with most of them and thus had to endure the jealous enmity of that almost equally old but much more quarrelsome monastery further up on the mountain, Enryaku-ji.

These military monks often descended and destroyed Kiyomizu-dera. In The Tale of the Heike, there is a full account of one such attack that tells how they bore down on the place, burned every last one of its halls and cells to the ground, and butchered whomever they could find.

Yet, despite being many times destroyed, the main hall has always been rebuilt, more or less in this early palace style (that which we now visit is a seventeenth-century copy) and Kiyomizu-dera maintained its eminence (it is high on the list of places sacred to Kannon and thus a place of lucrative pilgrimage) and it continues to prosper.

Kiyomizu-dera retains something of the reverence which the architecture demands and which Kannon herself requests. Long ago, Sei Shonagan on one of her outings about the capital decided to make a retreat to Kiyomizu-dera. She had often been there and apparently liked it. She had indeed already written of listening there with deep emotion to the cries of the cicadas, but now it was autumn and so she wrote:"Going to Kiyomizu, I was about to start climbing up to the temple when I noticed the smell of burning firewood. I was so deeply moved by its charm."