Here’s an update in dialogue with the post on Tamagawa Daishi:

The nooks in the ceiling at Tamagawa Daishi are so layered with soot that they eat light the same way lacquerware does. It’s like staring into a dusty black hole. The tunnel underneath the temple is damp and primordial. Overall, it achieves its mystic in the ways listed by Junichiro Tanizaki in “In Praise of Shadows”. It’s in that threshold between light and dark. 

I went to another Shingon temple recently that used similar features in a completely different manner but still to the same affect. Fukagawa-Fudo is like the modern version of Tamagawa Daishi. It has a 21st century version of the tunnel at Tamagawa Daishi. When you enter the temple you go through a hallway lined top-to-bottom with clear plastic alters lit up with LEDs. It’s a bit like being inside that old Windows Flying Through Space screensaver if you multiplied the number of stars. I think what interested me about the experience is that it was essentially the exact opposite of the Tamagawa Daishi tunnel. Instead of removing you from light and occasionally revealing the shadows on different parts of the Buddhist cosmology in a warm filament light, it completely showers you in a cool bright light. In some ways the unnatural quality of the LEDs actually serves to remove you even further from the point on the planet and transport you to the ritual world the hallway refers to. I suppose it’s a similar effect to walking down a neon-gai at night. 

The second floor of the Fukagawa-fudo had an even more impressive room. It was a room of depictions of different Buddhist deities and prayer wheels, but the entire space was set up like an early 90s bowling alley’s black light night or a blacklight mini golf course. Every depiction was made on plexiglass in some kind of fluorescent paint. Even the wallpaper and the carpet had a fluorescent element.    

I think the next project that I want to work on is a juxtaposition of these two temples. One completely greasy with incense smoke and decades of dust, damp and sweet smelling like aged wood. The other covered from floor to ceiling with LEDs like some kind of spiritual dekatora. The religious premise of both temples and both passageways is the same. In one you’re separated from light and in the other you’re absolutely flooded with it. 

It’s interesting to see the way Shingon symbolizes light and uses it in religious instruction. It’s interesting to see the way it’s handled across decades. It’s hard to imagine the Catholic church for example replace the sacramental wine and wafer with grape fizz and pringles or mass with some sort of smartphone app. I suppose there’s contemporary Christian music, but it’s so decidedly uncool even without the Fukagawa-fudo comparison. I think it’s definitely the physical aspect of both of these religious practices that interest me the most. You really have to submerge yourself in both cases – one in darkness and the other in light.