Kyoto Revisited - Tenryu-ji Monastery

April 05, 2015  •  Leave a Comment

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Our next adventure involved going to a completely different area of Kyoto and visiting the Tenryu-ji Monastery - with yet another beautiful garden.  But on this day we also visited the 200 year old Hogo-in Villa on the monastery grounds, ventured into the town and tried to find a place for lunch (one where we could understand the menu and order something we thought we would like) and finished with a walk through the bamboo forest on the way to the home of a Japanese period film actor. 

Our first stop, the monastery gardens, are some of the oldest in Kyoto.  They were designed by a renowned priest, meditation teacher, and garden designer in the 1300's.

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We left the gardens to walk to another area of the monastery to visit the 200 year old Hogo-in Villa, which is an wonderful example of a very inventive type of Japanese architecture.

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The exterior of the villa.

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The gardens seen from inside the villa.

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Another view of the garden, this time taken through the rippled glass of 200 year old windows.

 

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A detail from inside the villa.

 

We wandered around the monastery grounds both before and after lunch, enjoying the garden details and interesting statuary.

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Eventually our group left the monastery grounds and took a short walk to the bamboo forest - which turned out to be completely mobbed with people!  There were tourists from other countries, but primarily Japanese families were enjoying the walk through the forest.  Personally, I was disappointed in the area, the bamboo was fenced off, so we walked a path that was surrounded on both sides by a six foot fence.  Somehow, it wasn't what I had imagined.

 

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