Abstract
Located in Kita-Ku of Kyoto City, Japan, the famous ancient Temple of the Golden Pavilion was destroyed in an arson by a novice monk in 1950. Basing his story on this event, the writer Mishima Yukio published his masterpiece, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, in 1956. In 1958, the director Ichikawa Kon re-narrated the story of the Golden Pavilion in his film, Enjo. This paper points out the alchemical images between the event of the Temple of the Golden Pavilion and creative activities; by making use of the concepts in Jungian psychology, it treats the fiction and film as different symbols of this abstract mind of ＂the burning of the Golden Pavilion Temple.＂ It first concisely investigates the sublime aesthetics expounded in the fiction of The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, and then explains how the ideas of shadow, coniunctio, collective unconsciousness, self and the image of alchemy in the deep undercurrents of the text approach the consummation of an individual and artistic mind. In addition, it also discusses the film, Enjo, as another individual mind for comparison; the discussion is based on image analysis, explaining how the film text exhibits a different mind structure by means of an objective method and dualistic viewpoints. The final part of the paper offers a general discussion on the alchemy and sublimation of the text; and here, the text can be an event, a fiction, and a film, or even the abstract mind that precedes everything, interpreting the life cycle of the creative mind represented by the Golden Pavilion Temple.