The novel is loosely based on the burning of the Reliquary (or Golden Pavilion) of Kinkaku-ji in Kyoto by a young Buddhist acolyte in 1950.

The pavilion, dating from before 1400, was a national monument that had been spared destruction many times throughout history, and the arson shocked Japan.

The protagonist, Mizoguchi, is the son of a consumptive Buddhist priest who lives and works on Cape Nariu on the north coast of Honshū.

Throughout his childhood he is assured by his father that the Golden Pavilion is the most beautiful building in the world, and the idea of the temple becomes a fixture in his imagination.

The Temple is visited by a drunk American soldier who orders Mizoguchi to trample his pregnant Japanese girlfriend's stomach, giving him two cartons of cigarettes.

He sets off northwest the next morning, and spends three days at Yura, where the sight of the Sea of Japan inspires him to destroy the Kinkaku.

He goes outside to sink some non-inflammable items in the pond, but on turning back to the temple he finds himself filled with his childhood visions of its beauty, and he is overcome by uncertainty.

Hortense Calisher of The New York Times referred to The Temple of the Golden Pavilion as "surely one of his best" and noted that it had been praised upon its 1959 release in the West.

[1] The only proven and detailed information in English on the arson comes from Albert Borowitz's Terrorism for Self-Glorification: The Herostratos Syndrome (2005), which includes translations of interview transcripts published in the book Kinkaku-ji Enjō (1979) by Mizukami Tsutomo, a novelist who had known the boy at school.

His sentence was reduced on account of his schizophrenia; he was released on 29 September 1955, the same year that the rebuilding commenced, and died in March 1956.

[2] Mishima collected all the information he could, even visiting Hayashi in prison,[3] and as a result the novel follows the real situation with surprising closeness.