Daikaku-ji

The emperor Saga (786-842), son of Kammu who founded Kyoto in 794, made himself a detached palace, the Saga-so, in the far western reaches of the city. There he entertained the local literati, arranged to be posthumously included among the Three Learned Emperors, and led a pleasant life.

Its qualities are seen in the advice he offered when he relinquished the throne to Emperor Junna. "Just stroll among these hills, along these rivers, without concern for rank; take your pleasures with brush or with lute, and have no thought of what you will do next."

He might also have mentioned boating, an activity of which he was fond and in which he often engaged on his own Osawa Pond, a small body of water next door to the palace, designed in tidy imitation of Lake Dongting in China.

Here he also invented the art of flower arranging, though this claim is challenged by that of Ninna-ji which has its own ikebana history. The emperor is supposed to have docked at one of the little islands and picked some chrysanthemums which he arranged so as to embody the Taoist Great Triads—Heaven, Earth, Man (Ten, Chi, Jin). This gave rise to the Saga school of flower arranging, one which still prospers.

The pond and its artistic associations are also otherwise remembered. Centuries later the emperor Go-Toba stood on its narrow shores and composed a poem about standing by this little lake. Though these shores are much changed from what they once were, that autumn moon now shining is just the same.

The pleasures of nostalgia went well with the historical little pond.

The Saga-so underwent its first transformation in 876 when the emperor Seiwa had the place made into a temple in honor of the founder of Shingon Buddhism, Kobo Daishi. This was named Daikaku-ji, the Temple of Great Enlightenment.

Among the reasons for making the palace a temple was that Kyoto was undergoing one of its occasional epidemics. The emperor was persuaded to make a special offering to the Buddha. This consisted of writing the scripture, Hannya Shingyo, while simultaneously reciting it. The resultant manuscript was enshrined in the new Shingyo-den, an octagonal store-house on the grounds of the new temple—and there (though the temple is now concrete) it apparently still rests.

Yet, temple though the palace had become, Daikaku-ji was never a place of ecclesiastical learning, nor even a place of worship. As a later historian wrote, it was a temple where the emperor paid his respects to the deities who had blessed the country. By serving as a medium for carrying out the emperor's will Daikaku-ji had become a place from which the emperor's wishes were made known.

The temple thus remains worldly in the most open manner. There are still modern pleasure barges on the pond and nary a smell of incense in the corridors. That the place was to serve as seat for imperial authority is, however, a fact not without its ironies, because this imperial authority was to be eventually challenged, and at Daikaku-ji itself.

During the era now known as the Period of the Northern and Southern Courts (1336—92) there was a serious dispute between the two branches of the imperial line over the proper means of succession.

Rival courts were established. The northern was at the Jimyo-in, following the emperor Go-Fukakusa. The southern was at Daikaku-ji, following the emperor Kameyama. Rivalry grew into warfare and Ashikaga Takauji—of the family which would eventually take over imperial authority—decided that Daikaku-ji would have to be destroyed.

The event is laconically noted in the Daikaku-ji Fu (The Chronicles of Daikaku-ji). "There was a fire on August 28, 1338. The temple halls and priests' quarters were completely destroyed. Though they were rebuilt, the new structures never reached even half the size of those previous."

Fifty years later, the glories of Daikaku-ji were still being remembered. Emperor Go-Kameyama wrote with nostalgia of the grandeur of an age now past. His sleeves were wet from wiping his eyes, he said, as he wept over times of peace long gone.

For Go-Kameyama, who ruled from 1383 to 1392, war was always present. The battles of the Onin destroyed much of the capital and it was not until the unification and the Tokugawa period (1600-1867) that the longed for peace was achieved—at great cost.

In 1626 Daikaku-ji was again reconstructed when the emperor Go-Mizunoo donated his imperial hall of state as the new Shinden, which he then had lavishly decorated with many paintings and screens. In front of the reconstructed hall he also had planted (a tradition of the imperial garden plan) a wild orange tree and a plum tree to the right and left of the main entrance.

None of this improvement could, however, quite obliterate the sense of space which still permeates many of these ancient temple compounds. Just as the easy curves of the Ishiyama-dera roofs, the latticed verandahs, and the paneled doors recall even now the grace of Heian times, so, too, the spaces of Daikaku-ji retain still something of those ancient years.

How fittingly emptiness suits places of worship. Perhaps this is because we are to fill it ourselves. Lao-Tzu in the Tao Te Ching pointed out that kitchenware is useful only for its hollowness, and houses can be lived in only because they are empty. A temple, just as a church or a mosque, must be filled with space. Like a pot or a pan it defines a void.

At Daikaku-ji, this void is made civil because of its long tradition of imperial ease. The rooms are punctuated by regular shoji which let in light and at the same time transform it. The sections of the main hall are marked only by low lacquer fences. These are not walls which cut off, they are barriers which enlarge. The altar itself is a presence, standing like an imperial personage in the middle of this space, defining it, marking it, authorizing it.