Introductory Essay – Endnote 2

2 “Temple Mountain”

“Temple mountain” throughout this text it placed inside quotation marks to distinguish an architectural icon or representation of the mythical Mt. Meru (Sumeru) from a mountain temple, that is, a temple built on a mountains. “Temple mountains” in the former sense, perhaps unsurprisingly, appear most frequently in topographies like those of Karnataka, Cambodia, the Peten and the Nile Valley where opportunities for mountain temples are severely limited. Among an actual range of peaks, a mountain temple might appear an ersatz imitation, an “antefix” or aedicule of the real thing; the builders of the Parthenon and the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, for example felt no need to simulate altitude.

In China, where important Buddhist monasteries were often located in aeries, “mountain” came to refer to that temple’s wider sect, its sub-temples, branches and spiritual influence.  In Japan, the Gozan or “five temples” system instituted by the Kamakura shogunate (1185-1333) formalized this usage by anointing thefive Rinzai Zen (Ch.> Chan) temples for official patronage, protection but also supervision, to counter the powerful Tendai Enryaku-ji and Shingon Kongobu-ji located on Mt. Heie and Mt. Koya, respectively. Low-land Nanzen-ji in Kyoto was the primus inter pares among these Gozan “mountains.”

The mountain temple is explored in an Asian contextinChanchani, Natchiket, Mountain Temples and Temple Mountains:  Architecture, Religion and Nature in the Central Himalayas (University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2019.)