Today I visited Kinkaku-ji, one of Kyoto’s most famous
temples and one of the sights I was the most interested in, since I’ve read
about it in Mishima Yukio’s novel, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion.
Everything is set up for high expectations. Mishima,
probably the formost aestethician I know of, has written a book about the
perceived beauty of the Golden temple. The guidebook warns that the Kinkaku-ji
is almost always crowded, so better go either early or late; and when I arrive there
is already quite a crowd, that only grows during the time I spend there.
The beauty of the Kinkaku-ji was already fabled when it
accrued a tragic air in 1950, when the centerpice of the temple, the golden
pavilion, was burned to the ground by a young monk.
The temple was rebuilt into an (almost) exact replica of
itself, while the story of the obsessed monk was turned into the novel by
Mishima, who uses the story to discuss the impression of beauty on a human
mind.
Beauty. I’ll need a defintion. How about this: that which
pleases me aesthetically is considered beautiful by me. It will have to do.
I look at the temple. Is it beautiful? As usual, instead of
a straight answer, ramblings of what long-dead philosophers might have said
flicker through my brain.
Plato: It is beautiful if it has any part of the idea of
beauty in it (I don’t know how this is supposed to help).
Aristotle: Beauty is a result of function. If the temple
serves its purpose well, whatever that purpose may be, then it is correct to call
it beautiful, at least in relation to that purpose.
Well, you see how it is. Luckily, more gifted people than
myself have handled this issue. In Mishima’s novel, the role of the temple in
the mind of the protagonist Mizoguchi, is formed by his father, who tells him
storeis about the temple’s fabled beauty. Mizoguchi imagines this beautiful
temple. Then, after a while, he gets to actually see the temple for real:
”The Golden Temple
cast a perfect shadow on the surface of the pond, where the duckweed and the
leaves from water plants were floating. The shadow was more beautiful than the
building itself /.../
Well, what do you
think? said Father. It’s beautiful, isn’t it? /.../
I Changed my angle of
vision a few times and bent my head in various directions. But the temple
aroused no emotion within me. It was merely a small, dark, old, three-storied
building. The phoenix on top of the roof looked like a crow that had alighted
there for a rest. Not only did the building fail to strike me as beautiful, but
I even had a sense of disharmony and restlessness. Could beauty, I wondered, be
as unbeautiful a thing as this.” (Chapter 1)
Mizoguchi had already formed an idealized notion of the
temple, one which the real temple could not possibly compete with. This, his
subjective idea of the temple, comes to interpose itself between Mizoguchi and
the temple. After that first view, he seems to deny that mundane reality, to
shrink back from it, and hides in the idealized beauty of the temple in his
mind.
This pattern of thinking has a terrible cost though, for the
temple interposes itself between Mizoguchi and all possible expressions of
beauty:
”Finally, I slipped my
hand up the girl’s skirt. Then the Golden Temple appeared before me. /.../
Inasmuch as the girl had been rejected by the Golden Temple, my efforts at
finding life, too, were rejected. How could I possibly stretch out my hands
towards life when I was so enwrapped in beauty?” (Chapter 5)
Thus his final act of burning the temple down is an attempt
to regain control of his life, an attempt to connect to the world around him.
For that to have any chance of success, the temple must be destroyed.
As for my stance, I do not believe in ”pure” beauty. The
temple in itself, referring to the building that was burned down, is not in
itself beautiful. I agree that it is well-crafted, just as a person may be
good-looking, but that is not in itself beauty. For anything to transcend to
beauty, context is needed.
For a person to be beautiful, the necessary context would be
his/her thoughts, acts and personal traits. For a building such as the golden
temple, the most immediate context is its surroundings, the features of the
site: the pond, the islands, the trees.
In my view, this means that the temple building cannot be beautiful on
its own: its beauty is not inherent, it’s contextual. This view seems to be at
least discreetly acknowledged by Mishima in the chapter 1 quote above, where
Mizoguchi notices that ”the shadow was more beautiful than the building
itself”.
Since beauty is contextual, Mizoguchi’s efforts to destroy
the beauty of the golden temple seem futile: he cannot destroy the beauty by
just burning down the temple. In the end, he seems to realize this, but he is
driven on by his own existential fatalism:
”One part of my mind kept telling me that it was now futile
to perform this deed, but my new-found strength had no fear of futility. I must
do the deed precisely because it was so futile.” (chapter 10)
One might add that once Mizoguchi decides on his course of action,
he is in a way free: the temple no longer oppresses him, and he can function
sexually. Thus his personal, psychological reasons for destroying the temple
have also been removed at this point.
Of course, Mizoguchi could not have destroyed the beauty of
the temple even if he had also managed to destroy the surroundings: the history
and mythology of the temple is also part of the context that gives the temple
its beauty. Ironically then, by burning down the golden pavillion, Mizoguchi
actually enhanced its beauty. The modern visitors may marvel at the
reconstructed building, while also reflecting upon the loss of the original.
This poignancy adds to the beauty of the site.
(Could this be the face of the next crazy person to try to burn the temple? Only time will tell.)
