The Silver Pavilion and its gardens

"I love
My hut
At the foot of the Moon-awaiting Mountain
And the reflection
Of the sinking sky"

The Yamasa Institute reproduces this poem by Ashikaga Yoshimasa describing the "Silver Pavilion", Ginkaku-ji, in the foothills east of Kyoto.

Ginkaku-ji was intended to contrast with Kinkaju-ji, a spectacular pavilion covered in gold leaf located northwest of the city. Each began life as a villa for a member of the Ashikaga family, and became Zen temples. The grandson of the owner of Kinkaju-ji built his pavilion intending to cover it in silver leaf. But this plan was never realized.


Today, the temple complex is officially called Jisho-ji.

The original name of the building on the edge of the central pond persists in common use, and the impression it makes continues to be a personal retreat.

Unlike more massive Buddhist temples that overwhelm with the size of their buildings and the images contained inside, Ginkaku-ji is intimate, a cluster of buildings linked by mossy and raked gardens surrounding a small pool of water, nestled on the edge of the steep eastern mountains.

The raked garden is attributed in tourist guides to Soami, described as a a landscape gardener. He was much more: curator of the art collection of the Ashikaga shoguns, he practiced the arts of poetry, painting, flower arranging, and the tea ceremony, as well as designing gardens.

The dry garden, Ginshaden, Sea of Silver Sand, incorporates a tall conical mound of gravel. Guide books describe it as representing Mount Fuji, but its name-- Kogetsudai-- links it to viewing the moon, the activity described in Ashikaga Yoshimasa's poem.

 The raked garden was not mentioned in historic texts until long after the place was built. Its form may not directly owe its inspiration to Soami.

But the plantings and placement of stones around the pond in front of the Silver Pavilion were created as art works; the Yamasa Institute describes the views as "meant to conjure an image from classic Japanese or Chinese literature".




Individual stones in the garden are named. "Bridge of the Pillar of the Immortal" crosses the pool at one point. Directly in front of the pavilion, a single stone surrounded by water is called "Ecstatic Contemplation".


Despite the uncertainties in its history, the fabric of the surviving pavilion, the setting and the care in creating changing views that always remain striking all suggest that it was composed carefully-- if not by Soami then by another artist working with the very materials of place to create beauty and peacefulness.

In the garden at Nijo castle

Nijo's garden is famous for the wealth and variety of its rocks.

This peculiar sentence captions one small picture in the two page spread on Nijo Castle in the Eyewitness Travel guide to Japan.

The main focus of the description is paintings in the rooms of the shogunate palace, Ninomaru, painted in the early 1600s by artists of the Kano school, actually members of a samurai family who gained prominence for the distinctive decoration of the walls of this rambling set of rooms. Kano school trees, birds, flowers, and landscapes spread across gold backgrounds. Even with the evident damage from 200 years of neglect during the period when Edo became the focus of power, they still are impressive.

The guide helpfully points to a scene of wild cats in a cloudy bamboo grove, noting that the artists "mistook leopards for female tigers". The paintings impress less for this supposed confusion and more for the way the bodies of the felines undulate, their heads elongated unnaturally. Signage in the palace notes that these cats "were unknown" in Japan at the time except through imported pelts, and we can imagine artists trying to think through these feline bodies with only house cats as models.

The palace creaks as we walk, an engineered effect called "nightingale floors" that would warn residents of anyone attempting to break in. The chirping becomes so normal that it is when it stops, in a section that perhaps has been restored (or is in need of restoration?) that the sound of shuffling feet without the bird noises becomes noticeable.

And then we exit into the pathway that winds over to the garden, with its justly remarked-on rocks. The water runs from a small fall arranged at one end, and the rocks surround the pool, each one individually distinctive. There are fewer people here enjoying the view. There are no benches, no resting places to stop; in a World Heritage site, keeping people moving is more the goal than allowing them to stop and contemplate. A few people arrange themselves in front of the water for photos of themselves to post for their friends and family.


I take my own photos, despite the unsuitable light, that suffuses everything with a mist that is like the clouds surrounding the mythical tigers in bamboo groves, enjoying their lives with their leopard companions. I want to be able to think of this place again.