Chi-Tenjo (Bloody Ceilings)

We took a Route 206 bus from JR Kyoto Station, and changed to Route 6 at Shijo-Omiya. Route 206 was a so-called ecological bus, and stopped its engine automatically when it stopped for a moment. Route 6 was a traditional one to climb the hill to Takano-mine, one of the Northern hills, Kitayama, in Kyoto.Genko-an was at the top of the hill. The entrance to its gate was already quiet and still, which screened the hot air on the street. The gate opens to a front garden of the temple. An alley with scale-like step stones leads to the main building. As I rang a cast iron bell, a middle-aged woman popped up to accept our fees.We crept through "shoji" to find ourselves in a further separated world. It was a "zen" world. A round window shows enlightenment while a square window shows delusion. It is interesting that we see the same garden through the two. Does that suggest it is how we see the world that is important, and not what we see? What I have talked about is what we see when we see things horizontally. Once you look up, you find bloody ceilings. The ceiling boards were once used as floor boards in Fushimi Castle some 400 years ago. Then Tokugawa Ieyasu, who would establish Tokugawa Shogunate later, and Toyotomi Regime were at the edge of war before Sekigahara Battle, a decisive battle between the two.On their way to the East, Toyotomi smashed the castle to upsurge, which was guarded by a relatively small number of samurais. Tokugawa had found it vain to leave a significant number of samurais there. Torii Tadamoto and his me were all killed in the battle, or committed seppuku before the fall of the castle.The tranquil world of Genko-an has been looked down by the bloody ceilings which were reused then. What does that mean?