And one of the central ideas in Buddhism is that everything beautiful, and also everything not beautiful, is fleeting. Like historian Ivan Morris wrote that in the literature of the time, there was a quote "feeling that the familiar order of things will soon come to an end." Which by the way is always an appropriate feeling. So the center of aristocratic court life was the capital, Heian Jyo, which during the Heian golden age may have had a populations as high as 100,000 people, making it much larger than most European cities at the time. It may have been a glorious capital but we don’t really know because most of the city was destroyed by earthquakes, or possibly fires, or possibly wars, or just the desire for new construction. We're not sure.
