The Gates for Entering into Tongdo-sa Temple, Korea

After looking around we entered into the temple, the first building was the entrance gate, one pillar gate.
It was strange usually this kind of the entrance gate would stand far away from the temple.
But in this temple, the one pillar gate was very close to the main temple buildings.

In my guess, it could be interpreted in many ways.
One of those interpretations would be the one pillar gate might be moved from far to here.
Actually the role of the one pillar gate in Buddhism is to prepare the visitors’ mind for entering into the temple from the this world.

So it was strange for me the size of the one pillar gate was not so tall when comparing to the size of this large temple.

The one pillar gate looked like an ornament.
The one pillar gate of this temple happened to make me compare with that of Songkwang-sa temple that is the representative monk jewelry temple among three jewelry temple in Korea.

Any way as soon as passing through the one pillar entrance gate, there was the 4 heaven kings gate which protect the Buddhist paradise. This gate also relatively small to compare with that of of other temples.

The next gate must be the diamond warriors’ gate. The diamond warriors protect Buddha and the teachings of Buddha.

But I could not find any the diamond warriors in this large temple. And by any chance I could look at the paintings of the diamond warriors on the wall of the Paradise hall serving for Amitabha Buddha.

It was first time for me to see this kind of style that those diamond gate was symbolized on the wall of the paradise hall and to be omitted in this large temple.

Suddenly it made me think of there must be a reason why they made all those entrance gate relatively small in comparing to other temples.