Mt. Hakusan

Mt. Hakusan.

Mt. Hakusan is the mountain of water. Five great rivers begin here — the Tedori, the Nagara, the Kuzuryū, the Shō, and the Itoshiro — and the rice paddies of three medieval provinces depended on the snowmelt that came down them. The mountain does not merely contain water. It manufactures the agricultural landscape of central Japan.

The opening of Hakusan as a sacred pilgrimage is unusually well-documented. In 717, a monk named Taichō, who had been practicing austerities in the foothills, made a vision-quest ascent of the central peak. At the summit pond, a small circular tarn that is almost always wrapped in cloud, he encountered Kukurihime-no-Kami — a relatively obscure goddess from the deep mythology who, in the foundational Kojiki, appears at the single critical moment when the male creator god Izanagi has fled from his deceased wife Izanami in the underworld and the two are arguing across the boundary between life and death. Kukurihime speaks. Her words are not recorded. She mediates.

This is the figure Taichō met. The goddess who can speak across the line between the living and the dead — the patron of the threshold, of the unfinished conversation. He built her a shrine on the summit, and beneath that, halfway up the mountain, he founded what would become the great medieval temple complex of Heisenji, which would dominate the religious geography of north-central Japan for the next thousand years.

The Hakusan tradition spread astonishingly across Japan. Every Shirayama-jinja and Hakusan-jinja in the country — there are over two thousand — derives from Taichō's opening of this mountain. The faith carried with it a particular character: water-focused, agricultural, attentive to the cycle of melt and flood and renewal that any rice-growing society depends on.

The summit pond is at 2,700 meters. The climb takes a full day from Bettōdaira, the standard trailhead, often with a hut stay in the alpine zone at Murodō. The trail crosses several distinct zones — beech forest, fir forest, scree, finally alpine — each with its own character of silence. The mountain holds patches of snow throughout the year. Even in mid-August, you cross snowfields above 2,400 meters, where the ground beneath you is, in a literal hydrological sense, becoming the water that the lowland farmers will use next month.

Stand at the small still tarn at the top. Mist closes around you. Nothing dramatic happens. The shrine, a simple wooden structure, is right there. What you feel, instead of any revelation, is that everything downstream — the rice in the paddies, the sake at the breweries, the rivers themselves — begins exactly here, in the silence of this small grey water. Kukurihime is, by tradition, the one who can speak across boundaries. The boundary here is between sky and earth, between cloud and water. She is still mediating.