Pavilions of Silver and Gold

The streets of Kyoto were designed on the pattern of a Go board, by dreamy and impish urban planners who surely had a drink or two. As one passes from square to square gazing vacantly at the thick cypress bark rooftops and sneering Fu dogs, one must feel a strange floating. The Shinkansen on one hand and the endless raws of Pavilions on the other.

The Silver pavilion burrows amid autumn leaves so vivid the trees seem to bleed. The persimmons are so gold and bright they hurt the eyes, and the sun stabs at you through the slender branches. The temple grounds are abandoned. Dark and mottled the great temple's silver leaf is, age-old tarnish that the monks, in their arcane meandering, had never bothered to polish, clinging to the sacredness of bedimmed metal.

It looks like the cringed and purring house of an ifrit. One almost expects some flame-tongued monster with wings of patchworked sin to tear open the door and screech some sulphurous koan at them. The temple is moss-grown and brooding, but honest, collected, like an old, stately elephant.

The Golden Pavilion is the one everyone wants to see, but when they do, it only ever looks yellow to them. It's ugly, just kind of garish. All the gold just seems like yellow paint. It looks sad and run down. It seems bellicose, thinking it's so beautiful. Arrogant and old.

I would like to be a novice here. I would like to lodge in the temple and drink bamboo tea and eat only six grains of rice until I looked like the Buddha, only thinner and thrice as beautiful. I would rake the red leaves, sweep the rushes aside in the fall, and leave clean water for the sacred cats. I would inhale the smell of sake breweries in the winter and eat one persimmon a year to honor the Emperor's birthday.

Every morning I would tear a square from my kimono, and polish the walls with it, peeling the tarnish off like an old woman's hair, until it glittered like water. After a while I would be naked and I would polish the walls with my own hair, and under my body it would resemble a house hollowed out of the moon.