Tag Archives: temple

Asakusa — the temple area

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We didn’t discover the interesting area around the temple until the second time we went there, and had more time to wander.

There were, to begin with, several statues of Buddha (or perhaps of Bodhisattvas).

A short digression is perhaps in order here. Dan and I are illiterate in Japanese, and we have gained a whole new–and sympathetic–understanding of the dilemmas that must face functionally illiterate people in our own country. We were certainly able to get around fine in Japan. Most public transportation have signs in English as well as Japanese; and people were also wonderfully friendly and willing to help. We also understood where we were and what we were seeing, at least in broad terms. But the details on explanatory signs (and most menus!) were too much for us. So I present here the beauty, or cuteness, of what we saw–and the Japanese are very, very good at both beauty and cuteness–but no details. Just as we experienced it.

And now on to the Buddhas. Or Bodhisattvas.

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Finally, my favorite. I actually don’t know who this little guy is, or anything about him. I just know: you gotta love him!

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There was a small but lovely landscaped area, with a stream running through it.

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The stream had myriads of red-and-white fish in it.

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And the fish were hungry.

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There were also numerous other objects of mystery.

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One small shrine I do know about (because they were kind enough to post its story in English as well as Japanese). Once upon a time, it seems, in the early eighteenth century, a housewife, digging in her garden, discovered buried there a jar full of gold coins. She worried that she and her husband would rely too heavily on those coins and become lazy and lose what they had. So she buried the coins again, and with this mindset, she and her husband worked hard and became very wealthy. They placed a statue of the Bodhisattva Jizo on the spot where they buried the coins. Today, this shrine is built over those coins.

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It contains the statue of the Bodhisattva (and several other statues of him, too). People come here to pray for success in their business enterprises.

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Asakusa — the Sensoji Temple

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Asakusa is considered an important “shitamachi” (that’s “low city” to you!) district of Tokyo. It does have its few high-rise and modern buildings, but many older streets and structures survive.

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But more of that later.

First, an important lesson in pronouncing Japanese. This will be helpful to anyone (well, any American English speaker, anyway) contemplating a trip to Japan. An American acquaintance of mine who spent a lot of time in Japan explained Japanese pronunciation this way: “They speak really fast and run all their syllables together.” I did not find this to be true, though I did find myself nearly choking on my tongue when trying to repeat the names of places the way they were announced in trains and subways.

Those of you who, like me, speak American English as a native language probably imagine that the name of this district would be pronounced “AH-suh-KOO-sah.” But this would be terribly wrong. The closest I was able to get is “Ah-SOCK-sah.” (I think the “u” is just there to space out the “k” and the “s” a little.) In general, I found I could get closer to correct by placing a strong emphasis on the second syllable rather than the first and third. Thus, for example, “Ka-NAH-z-wah” is better than “KA-na-ZA-wah.” Just so you know.

We visited Asakusa twice–once early in our trip, late in the morning; and then again on our very last day, when we spent an evening there and then got an early start in the morning. The early start turns out to be important, as the district can be crowded with tourists.

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The biggest tourist draw in Asakusa is the Buddhist Sensoji Temple. This temple is the oldest in Tokyo–originally built when Asakusa was just a fishing village in the seventh century–occupies a complex of numerous buildings, artifacts, and landscape features. The temple building and its ancillary structures are remarkable. I loved the large lanterns in the doorways.

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The roof tiles of the main hall, rebuilt in its original style after its destruction in World War II, are made of titanium.

I like this statue and the dragons on his fountain:

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Also, there are a number of lions.

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Decorative details include warriors and imaginative beasts.

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More on other parts of the temple area in the next post.

Looking up and down in Kanazawa

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We’ve been walking around in Kanazawa a lot in the last two days, and there’s a lot to like here. So it seems strange to start with smaller details, leaving the larger streetscape undescribed–but that’s what I’m going to do. Mostly, we look around us and report on what’s at eye level, more or less. But here are a few photos of what’s underfoot and overhead.

First, watch where you step! Here’s a cute and colorful manhole cover!

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Walk a few blocks, and there are some old temples with beautifully carved wooden gateways. Look up! Here are some of the carving details.

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Singapore – Bugis mosques and temples

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The ethnic names of places near Bugis–Little India, the Muslim district–reflect historical patterns of settlement in Singapore. But with the country’s powerhouse economic growth and its policy of achieving diversity in every area, there are no longer strong concentrations of ethnic folk in the area. Nevertheless, significant structures of worship remain. And are well attended.

On the pedestrian Waterloo Street is a traditional Chinese Buddhist temple, the Kwan Im Thong Hood Cho temple, founded in 1884 at this location and enlarged a century later to accommodate the throngs of visitors who come there to practice divination with joss sticks. Believed to bring good luck to its visitors, the temple is enormously popular.

 

 

Right next door stands the Sri Krishnan Hindu temple, dedicated to Lord Krishna (an incarnation of the god Vishnu) and adorned with exuberant technicolor statuary.

 

 

Nearby, as it turns out, are also Christian churches and a Jewish synagogue, which (alas) I didn’t see. Singapore is truly an ecumenical country, tolerant of and fostering all religions.

The Masjid Abdul Gaffoor is a handsome mosque located in the Little India area.

Construction began on this mosque in 1907. It is an historic landmark and was extensively renovated in 2003. The juxtaposition of this handsome building, with its stars-and-crescent-moon motif and its cinquefoil windows, with the rather garish modern tower in the distance is–for better or worse–a typical tableau in Singapore.

An even more significant mosque, Masjid Sultan, with its splendid golden dome, dominates the Muslim district.

 

There are numerous other houses of worship throughout Singapore, where people of all ethnicities and believes mingle peaceably.

 

Cambodia – Oudong region

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A number of new temples and monasteries have sprung up (or been rebuilt) in the vicinity of Oudong Mountain. We visited several. Alas, I don’t know the name of this temple. I can say only that it is fairly new and beautifully decorated, inside and out. The railings of the stairways and terraces are all seven-headed nagas (serpents), and lions guard the way.

  Inside, the temple is high and spacious. A large Buddha sitting under his Bo-tree dominates the room. His electric halo and fingers touching the ground show that he has achieved enlightenment.

 

 

The walls and ceilings are covered with paintings detailing the various incarnated lives of the Buddha.

 

 

Nearby a golden statue of the meditating Buddha protected by the king of nagas dominates a serene garden.

 

Cambodia – Everyday life a thousand years ago

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Besides for its astonishing collection of heads, Angkor Thom’s Bayon temple also contains a marvelous bas-relief depicting scenes from everyday life. I’m sure that someone, somewhere, has an idea of what all these people are doing. Some of them, I can identify. As for the rest, the pictures are charming, but I don’t know. Respond with a comment if you think you have a clue!

Also, please don’t ask me what all those fish and crocodiles and so on are doing up in the sky. Maybe that’s what they get during monsoon season instead of “raining cats and dogs.” Or maybe the bas-relief works its way downwards and there’s some naval scene up above.

   I think the next couple of pictures depict people in houses.

 Now we come to a few that I might identify. A couple of scenes where people are cooking.

  A woman giving birth, perhaps.

Men playing a board game.

And finally, of course, war.

 

 

Cambodia – Angkor Thom, the Bayon temple

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Remember the Churning of the Ocean of Milk? The story reappears at Angkor Thom, where the gods on one side and the giants on the other, each pulling at their half of the great serpent, form railings leading to the main entrance of the Bayon temple.

  

You can’t see them well in this picture, but there are huge faces in the stone above the entryway.

In fact, there are huge faces all over the place at Angkor Thom’s Bayon temple. I was going to say the place was crawling with them…but that’s too weird an image. These faces are quite still. They haven’t moved in over nine hundred years. Not much, anyway.

      

 

Inle Lake – near Phaung Daw Oo Pagoda

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From the deck of the restaurant where we ate lunch, we could see the splendid temple we would tour shortly.

This pagoda houses five ancient and sacred Buddha images, which are believed to have been brought to Myanmar from the Malay peninsula sometime in the twelfth century. The images are small–only nine to eighteen inches high–and so much gold leaf has been applied to them in this century alone that you can no longer even guess they were once Buddhas. I don’t have a photo, but there is a good image here.

As you might guess, these small statues are uncommonly heavy.

Therefore, it may come as no surprise that when an unexpected storm came up while the Buddhas were being transported on their annual round of the Inle Lake villages and the ceremonial boat capsized, they sank to the bottom of the lake.

The lake is not deep, and four of the five statues were recovered. But search as they may, no one could find the fifth–and largest statue. You can imagine everyone’s surprise when they returned to the temple with the other four statues, and the fifth one was waiting for them there.

Clearly, this one statue didn’t want to travel any more. And so for the last fifty years, only four of the statues make the annual round of the villages.

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After lunch, we took the back way and walked to the pagoda. Dan and I being the kind of tourists that we are, we found the backyards as interesting as the waterfront.

 

 

A canal separated us from the temple. From its bank we watched some young women doing, um, something, involving tin cans and water. Then we crossed the narrow pedestrian bridge.

 

At the temple, groups of people talked or prayed, but we didn’t see anyone applying gold leaf right then.

Bagan – Seen (scene) along the road

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You can’t drive anywhere in Bagan without passing temples and stupas. Many of these have names; maybe they all do. But many are just mysterious, ancient, and beautiful structures we just passed by on the way to somewhere else. Hey, it would take a year or more to visit them all!

The next two photos are of Hti-lo Minlo Temple, a place we possibly would have visited, had I not inadvertently forgotten to collect my shoes from the previous temple in my haste to escape a crowd of vendors who were desperate to make a living in this off-season for tourists and knew a sucker when they saw one (I’d foolishly bought something from one of them).

 

 

Yes, I did manage to retrieve the sandals!  😉

Below are some other temples and stupas, whose names I don’t know. But they sure are pretty…

          

Possibly, one or two of these might be other views of Htilo-Minlo from other angles on the road, I’m not sure. But I hope that all of these photos will show you something of the beauty and grace of the Bagan landscape.