10D9N Spring Japan Trip: Tenryuji Temple, Kyoto
Tenryuji is the most famous temple in Arashiyama district. It is a world cultural heritage site and hence, a lot of visitors from all around the world make their way to Arashiyama to Tenryuji Temple. If this is your first trip to Japan, you will notice that there are a lot of the red torii gates whenever a temple is nearby. The torii gates symbolically marks the transition from the profane to the sacred. There is a small torii gate on the way to Tenryuji Temple in Arashiyama, too.
If you have not had your lunch yet, you can have a vegetarian Buddhist meal at a restaurant inside Tenryuji Temple called Shingetsu. This restaurant is pretty famous and I have read a lot of review on Tripadvisor about it.
The area in front of Tenryuji Temple is free to roam about. However, if you would like to enter the temple and the beautiful Hojo garden inside the temple, you have to visit the admission ticket office, which location is shown by the red arrow.
The admission to Tenryuji Temple and Hojo Garden costs 500 JPY. We did not really have much time to explore so we gave this a miss. If you have chance to explore the temple, you should give it a visit as it's not everyday you can visit the biggest Japanese zen Buddhist temple.
A section of the temple which I don't really know because my ability to read traditional Chinese character (which is similar to Japanese kanji) is limited.
The main entrance of Tenryuji Temple. Tenryuji is the head temple of its own school within the Rinzai Zen sect of Japanese Buddhism. It is considered a hard work to preserve the main temple buildings of Tenryuji because history says that Tenryuji's buildings were repeatedly lost in fires and wars over the centuries. Kudos to the Japanese people to restore the temple again and again.
