The first great temple--En-gaku-ji--invites us to cross the canal by a
little bridge facing its outward gate--a roofed gate with fine Chinese
lines, but without carving. Passing it, we ascend a long, imposing
succession of broad steps, leading up through a magnificent grove to
a terrace, where we reach the second gate. This gate is a surprise; a
stupendous structure of two stories--with huge sweeping curves of roof
and enormous gables--antique, Chinese, magnificent. It is more than four
hundred years old, but seems scarcely affected by the wearing of the
centuries. The whole of the ponderous and complicated upper structure is
sustained upon an open-work of round, plain pillars and cross-beams; the
vast eaves are full of bird-nests; and the storm of twittering from the
roofs is like a rushing of water. Immense the work is, and imposing in
its aspect of settled power; but, in its way, it has great severity:
there are no carvings, no gargoyles, no dragons; and yet the maze
of projecting timbers below the eaves will both excite and delude
expectation, so strangely does it suggest the grotesqueries and
fantasticalities of another art. You look everywhere for the heads of
lions, elephants, dragons, and see only the four-angled ends of beams,
and feel rather astonished than disappointed. The majesty of the edifice
could not have been strengthened by any such carving.
After the gate another long series of wide steps, and more trees,
millennial, thick-shadowing, and then the terrace of the temple
itself, with two beautiful stone lanterns (toro) at its entrance. The
architecture of the temple resembles that of the gate, although on
a lesser scale. Over the doors is a tablet with Chinese characters,
signifying, 'Great, Pure, Clear, Shining Treasure.' But a heavy
framework of wooden bars closes the sanctuary, and there is no one to
let us in. Peering between the bars I see, in a sort of twilight, first
a pavement of squares of marble, then an aisle of massive wooden pillars
upholding the dim lofty roof, and at the farther end, between the
pillars, Shaka, colossal, black-visaged, gold-robed, enthroned upon a
giant lotus fully forty feet in circumference. At his right hand some
white mysterious figure stands, holding an incense-box; at his left,
another white figure is praying with clasped hands. Both are of
superhuman stature. But it is too dark within the edifice to discern who
they may be--whether disciples of the Buddha, or divinities, or figures
of saints.
Beyond this temple extends an immense grove of trees--ancient cedars
and pines--with splendid bamboos thickly planted between them, rising
perpendicularly as masts to mix their plumes with the foliage of the
giants: the effect is tropical, magnificent. Through this shadowing, a
flight of broad stone steps slant up gently to some yet older shrine.
And ascending them we reach another portal, smaller than the imposing
Chinese structure through which we already passed, but wonderful, weird,
full of dragons, dragons of a form which sculptors no longer carve,
which they have even forgotten how to make, winged dragons rising from a
storm-whirl of waters or thereinto descending. The dragon upon the panel
of the left gate has her mouth closed; the jaws of the dragon on the
panel of the right gate are open and menacing. Female and male they are,
like the lions of Buddha. And the whirls of the eddying water, and
the crests of the billowing, stand out from the panel in astonishing
boldness of relief, in loops and curlings of grey wood time-seasoned to
the hardness of stone.
The little temple beyond contains no celebrated image, but a shari only,
or relic of Buddha, brought from India. And I cannot see it, having no
time to wait until the absent keeper of the shari can be found.