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Preface

There are nearly two thousand places of worship in Kyoto and the great majority of them are Buddhist temples. Any book can thus hold only a certain number. This one includes twenty-one, yet in a sense it also contains them all. Neither a history nor a guide, it is an illustrated essay on the nature and the history of the Buddhist temple. It could thus have included less, or more, or those different from the ones chosen.

That choice was determined years before the text was written when the photographer, in the city for the first time, turned his trained architectural eye only upon what interested him. Consequently, many a famous temple is not included and some included are not famous at all. Further, since it was the design, the space of the place which appealed, no distinction was made as to just which part of the space was being rendered. The eccentric result is a portfolio of pictures which attempts to render no precise information and at the same time truly captures the presence of the temples of Kyoto.

These construct a spatial narrative—a sheaf of vistas which define but do not limit. In this way the photographer is very like the bunjin artists of old Japan, those profound amateurs who looked for essence, not in order, but in the sighting of a scene.

In the same fashion, the author, almost equally ignorant, years later following the path of the photographer he never met, has attempted to do with time what had been done with space—to make a temporal record of what he has read or heard or himself seen.

So, I wanted something like a narrative—a broken chronology with many a hole through which one might peer back into time itself, a history arranged in layers through which we can move from one temple to the next.

Together, the text and pictures seek then to define the temple. The photos contain few people and the text is filled with the deeds of the dead. A kind of definition seems possible.

—DONALD RICHIE