Design Review: Toji Temple Five-story Pagoda’s ground floor interior
I visited Toji Temple (東寺) for the first time today. It is the indispensable part of the tourist track in Kyoto, which had been putting me off over the past two and half years of my life in Japan’s ancient capital city.
Only recently I have learned that Toji Temple, one of Kyoto’s oldest temples, is an interesting place to visit from the viewpoint of art installation and interior design. As someone who once wanted to become an interior designer, I now have a reason to check the place out.
Pictured above is Toji Temple’s landmark tower, the Five-story Pagoda (五重塔), which has been the tallest wooden building in Japan ever since it was built at the end of the 9th century (the current tower was built in 1644).
Just like Gothic churches in the 13th- and 14th-century Europe, it is not hard to imagine that such a tall tower awed people back in those days.
But what impressed me was the design of its ground floor interior. The golden statues of seated buddhas (those enlightened) and standing bodhisattvas (those in the final stage of the path to enlightenment) surround the thick rectangular wood column at the center:
The central column supports the five-story pagoda. If it is the tallest wooden building in Japan today, it means the pagoda was the tallest of all the buildings in Japan until the 19th century, when concrete and steel were brought in from Europe. So people in pre-modern Japan must have believed that the pagoda was beyond this world. The central column that supports the unworldly tower should have also been seen as something like a god.
Then the temple monks would tell the visitors that the central column is Mahavairocana (大日如来), the most important buddha in Vajrayana (密教)—the Toji Temple’s sect of buddhism—who represents the truth of the universe. If you just tell people about it, no one will understand. With the tallest pagoda and its supporting column visually seen, it is easier to understand.
That’s the power of architectural interior design. To educate people about Buddhism, the physical and architectural feature was incorporated into the message of religious art.
I was impressed.
