Daikaku-ji 大覚寺

Not prayer halls but rooms of the court, and you walk without shoes along the wooden corridors.

It began as a villa of Emperor Saga, in the early Heian period, and became a temple later: that is why inside it has the layout of a palace and not of a monastery. The Ōsawa, the pond dug for that villa in the ninth century, is one of the oldest water gardens in Japan. The temple is the headquarters of a school of ikebana, the Japanese art of arranging flowers.

Kyoto