Читать книгу Tenryu-ji - Norris Brock Johnson - Страница 9

The Temple of the Heavenly Dragon was sited to the west of Kyōto, and is embraced by the three influential prominences:

the Mountain of Storms (Arashiyama)

the Mountain of Dusk and Shadow (Ogurayama)

Turtle Mountain (Kameyama)

The mountainous region west of Kyōto was altered by people numerous times, neglected, abandoned for centuries, only to be subsequently reinhabited and renewed. The land itself remained compelling and continued to capture the transgenerational attention and imaginations of people. The temple came into being within this particular region in large measure because the land on which the buildings and the pond garden presently rest had long been experienced as deeply affecting, emotionally, aethetically, and spiritually (figs. 2, 5, 30).

During our walk through the present-day complex to the pond garden, we experienced salient aspects of nature from which the landscape aspect of the temple was formed: water, stones and rocks, trees and foliage, and the land itself, especially mountains (figs. 27–29). These aspects of nature were not selected as vital features of the landscape aspect of the temple by any one person exclusively, nor all at one time, but selected at various times by people influential enough to define a landscape.²

The human-created landscape aspects of the present-day temple were assembled over time. Successive occupants of the region west of Kyōto, for instance, added large-scale waterways and ponds to the landscape within which the temple emerged (the evocative stones placed in and around the present-day pond in the garden, the subject of Part II, are a comparatively recent addition to the landscape of the temple).

Three people of influence in early Japan began to alter aspects of the mountainous area west of Kyōto for their individual purposes. In time, buildings began to appear as aspects of the landscape. In the historical overview to follow we will consider the cumulative landscape-defining influences of Tachibana no Kachiko (786–850, Empress Danrin, consort of Emperor Saga, 785–842), Prince Kaneakira (914–87, the eleventh son of Emperor Daigo, 885–930), and Emperor Go-Saga (1220–72).³

FIGURE 27. An expansive view of mountains to the south/southwest.

FIGURE 28. The roofs of buildings within the Temple of the Heavenly Dragon nestle within a sea of trees.

FIGURE 29. The pond garden customarily is experienced by people from the veranda of the rear western-side of the Abbot’s Quarters … and “the temple building, with its beautiful roof and delicate railing, seems to grow from its own reflection.”^f29.

The landscape aspect of the Temple of the Heavenly Dragon was fashioned over time from the interdependent relationship of people and nature as well as from belief in the intervention of deities and venerated ancestors in the landscape-making affairs of people.