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| Subject: Golden Pavilion Temple in Kyoto 13/11/2010, 10:26 pm | |
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The Golden Pavilion Temple, also called Kinkaku-ji in Japanese, wasbuilt in 1397 and it is located in Kyoto, Japan. It was initially madeto serve as a villa for retirement for Shogun Ashikaga. It was quitelater that his son converted the building into a Zen temple. The GoldenPavilion was burned twice and was reconstructed after five years. Inthe year 1950, a monk burned the entire temple into ashes and finallyplanned to take his own life by jumping behind the hill. The monksurvived the attempt to die. However, his mother due to the shame thather son had brought, jumped from the train into the river. The monk wassent to jail for 7 years where he died due to illness.The Golden Temple is a building with three stories. The upper twostories are covered with a pure gold sheet. The main purpose of thepavilion is to work as shariden, storing the remains of the Buddha’sashes. One can see a typical Chinese style built on the top floor. Themiddle section looks like the Zen style and the last, the ground flooris made similar to the shinden-zukuri-style and does not have the goldsheet on it.The entire temple is covered by a beautiful garden with a pond inthe front called the Mirror Pond. A lot of stones in the pond give arepresentation of the Buddhist’s era. In the year 1987, some parts ofthe temple were recoated in thicker gold and some interiors of thetemple were worked upon during the year 2003. | |
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