Finished, Heian-kyo was by eighth-century standards enormous. It measured three miles east to west and three and a half miles north to south. The boundaries were rectangular and great avenues crossed each other at regular intervals. One such divided the city into east and west (or left and right) capitals. It was nearly three hundred feet wide making it quite the widest avenue in the world. At its head stood the palace enclosure, the northern side of which formed part of the city limits; it measured one mile by three-quarters, of a mile, and had fourteen gates.
It was a smaller version of the Tang dynasty capital of Chang'an (modern Xi'an), the same city which had also served as earlier inspiration for Nara—but, of course, now without the many temples. Kammu carefully limited both their number and the admission of their priests.
Inside the city limits only two temples were permitted. Much smaller than any in Nara, they were given small plots symmetrically left and right of the main avenue. The western temple, Sai-ji, had so little support that it shortly withered. The eastern, To-ji, survived only because it formed a main branch of the Shingon sect in 835. Even now the temple is, in more senses than one, on the wrong side of the tracks.
Yet, even as anti-Buddhist edicts were promulgated, temples were rising and priests were joining. Outside the city walls it seemed like a sudden religious revival though it was in fact a scramble to get tax-free estates—a loophole which Kammu had left unplugged. A later imperial edict, admitting the difficulty, read:"If this continues, shortly there will be no land which is not temple property."
A further problem was that the court itself was already so permeated with Buddhism that the sometimes baleful ecclesiastical influence was all but impossible to eradicate. The problem was familiar one. Two parallel systems of power always quarrel: the church and the state have never anywhere been amicable.
A partial solution lay in deciding that it was Nara Buddhism which was the enemy and not Buddhism itself. A solution should be possible if only a new kind of Buddhism could be found—one without dangerous political ambitions. An accommodation was necessary. Consequently, not one but two such examples of benign Buddhism were shortly located.
The monks Saicho (767-822) and Kukai (774-835) had joined a trading mission in 804 and gone to China. Each brought back a separate set of Buddhist tantric beliefs. Saicho returned and consolidated the Tendai (T'ient'ai) sect, and its eventual headquarters at Enryaku-ji on Mount Hiei above Heian-kyo. Kukai founded the Shingon sect and set himself up at To-ji in the southern section of the capital and over at Ishiyama-dera, on the other side of Mount Hiei. He also later founded Kongobu-ji on Mount Koya. There, under his posthumous canonical name, Kobo Daishi, he lives still. Visitors are shown the moss-covered temple in which he lies, not dead, but meditating, awaiting the coming of the Buddha of the future.
This being will, among his other duties, have to purify his religion. Buddhism held that the state must reflect the order of the universe and that this is hierarchical, everything emanating from the permanent center. It could thus be used to justify the political centralization of the country. Buddhism in Japan—of the Nara variety or otherwise—had from the first been in this sense worldly. So are, to be sure, most religions, but the forms which Japanese Buddhism took made it seem even more so.
The Buddhist temple was everywhere (and at the same time more than) a place devoted to worship of the Buddha. It functioned as a residence for monks and nuns, where they studied the sutras and trained in ascetic practices, and it was in addition a place for lay worshippers to gather. There was thus—from the first, in all temples, in all Buddhist countries—a social element. It was the degree of this which differed in Japan.
The etymology of the Japanese term for temple, tera, suggests a predominance of the idea of place. The word derives from the Pali word thera, which means "elders," indicating perhaps a place where the church elders lived. The characters used are from the pre-Buddhist Han dynasty and indicate an area where bureaucratic officers stay, a reference to Confucian laws and their implementation. Thus, the predominantly social nature of later temples is suggested in the term.
This is not invariably so in other religions. The etymology of the English "temple," for example, suggests less worldly concerns. It is from the Latin templum which means a space measured out for sanctuary—thus containing a nuance missing in the Japanese.
Bruno Taut, the first serious foreign student of Japanese architecture, at once recognized that "temples constitute no clearly delimited space, as do churches, for instance, in the West..." He was puzzled by this and only began to understand when a Japanese architect friend informed him that temples were originally mostly people's houses—the statues and altars had just been added: Buddha had moved in and stayed.
This domestic Buddhism was necessary in that it supplied what the native religion, Shinto (which Taut did not consider a religion at all) did not. With Buddhism came accommodation, structure, and reason.
It followed then that Buddhist temples were patterned in part after social and political desires—-just what one might expect from a religion which was in Japan initially so close to the needs of the state.
In this Japanese temples were unlike both Shinto shrines—where a closeness to divine nature is insisted upon by the architecture itself—and Western churches, where the aspiring nature of Christianity is made visible in striving cathedral towers and lofty naves.
Japanese Buddhist architecture followed functional needs—practical, spiritual, and social. By the eighth century a temple pattern had evolved. Called the shichido garan (seven-hailed temple), it typically consisted of: the pagoda (to), a multistoried tower where relics such as nominal remains of the Buddha were enshrined; the main or "Buddha" hall (kondo, literally "golden hall") wherein was housed the principal object of worship; the lecture hall (kodo), usually the largest structure in the compound—where monks or nuns gathered for instruction, study, or ritual; the drum or bell tower (koro); the sutra repository (kyozo); the dormitories (sobo); and the dining hall (jikido).
There were other buildings as well. These included the inner sanctuary (naijin) where the priests performed their rituals, the outer sanctuary (gaijin) where laymen worshipped, bathrooms, toilets, and the various gates. These last were grouped into the outer gates (daimon) which were named after the cardinal points. The south gate (nan-daimon) was the front or main gate. The inner or middle gate {chumon) opened into the main precincts which contained the pagoda and the main hall. Later developments included the massive sanmon (triple gate) of Zen found in temples such as Tofuku-ji, Nanzen-ji, and the Chion-in. Balanced, symmetrical, speaking of order in a Chinese accent, this early architecture also displayed direct authority. It was a spatial narrative form, an architectural text which from its inception indicated a secular society and the need for a man-made order.
In this the imported Buddhist temple was as different from the local Shinto shrine as were the two religions from each other.
Buddhism in all of its forms encourages thoughts of evanescence, transience, the passing of all things, the attractions of the next world. It is also universalist and moralistic. Shinto—the native animistic religion of Japan—is vital: concerned only with the here and now. It is both pluralistic and amoral. It is also phobic about pollution and decay, while Buddhism is morbid in its reflections upon the imminence of death.
It was through fears of death and hopes of the consequent life beyond that Buddhism achieved its popularity—unlike Shinto which could threaten or promise nothing of the sort. Buddhism consequently