Golden Pavilion Temple in Kyoto

The Golden Pavilion Temple, also called Kinkaku-ji in Japanese, was built in 1397 and it is located in Kyoto, Japan. It was initially made to serve as a villa for retirement for Shogun Ashikaga. It was quite later that his son converted the building into a Zen temple. The Golden Pavilion was burned twice and was reconstructed after five years. In the year 1950, a monk burned the entire temple into ashes and finally planned to take his own life by jumping behind the hill. The monk survived the attempt to die. However, his mother due to the shame that her son had brought, jumped from the train into the river. The monk was sent to jail for 7 years where he died due to illness.

The Golden Temple is a building with three stories. The upper two stories are covered with a pure gold sheet. The main purpose of the pavilion is to work as shariden, storing the remains of the Buddha’s ashes. One can see a typical Chinese style built on the top floor. The middle section looks like the Zen style and the last, the ground floor is made similar to the shinden-zukuri-style and does not have the gold sheet on it.

The entire temple is covered by a beautiful garden with a pond in the front called the Mirror Pond. A lot of stones in the pond give a representation of the Buddhist’s era. In the year 1987, some parts of the temple were recoated in thicker gold and some interiors of the temple were worked upon during the year 2003.