There are nearly two thousand places of worship in Kyoto and the great majority of them are Buddhist temples. Any book can thus hold only a certain number. This one includes twenty-one, yet in a sense it also contains them all. Neither a history nor a guide, it is an illustrated essay on the nature and the history of the Buddhist temple. It could thus have included less, or more, or those different from the ones chosen.

      That choice was determined years before the text was written when the photographer, in the city for the first time, turned his trained architectural eye only upon what interested him. Consequently, many a famous