Mt. Kōya

Mt. Kōya.

Mt. Kōya is not a single peak but a hidden basin. From the lowlands of Wakayama, you ascend through nearly a thousand meters of cedar forest, switchback after switchback, until you emerge unexpectedly onto a plateau ringed by eight low mountains. This plateau — about a kilometer across — is Kōyasan. It is the headquarters of Shingon Buddhism and one of the most powerful sacred landscapes in Japan.

The story of how it became sacred is unusually concrete. The monk Kūkai, returning from China in 806 with the full transmission of esoteric Shingon Buddhism, spent years searching for the right location to establish his monastery. Tradition says he had a vajra — a ritual implement — that he had thrown from China while standing on the Chinese coast, asking it to land where his temple should be founded. Searching through the mountains south of Nara, he eventually met a hunter accompanied by two dogs. The hunter said: I am the god of this mountain, and you will find what you are looking for there. The dogs led him to this plateau. The vajra was hanging in a pine tree.

The hunter, in the older mountain religion, was Niu-Tsuhime-no-Mikoto and her consort Kōya-Myōjin, the deities of the place. Kūkai received the land from them; the older mountain religion and the new Buddhism were folded together, not in opposition. This pattern — the new tradition acknowledging and incorporating the older — is one reason Kōya became, over the following twelve centuries, a kind of religious ecosystem rather than a single doctrine.

The plateau holds over a hundred temples. Many of them are shukubō — temples that lodge pilgrims overnight, allowing visitors to participate in the morning fire-rite and meditation. The central temple complex includes the Konpon Daitō, a great two-story stupa, and the Kondō, the central hall. The architecture is unselfconscious. These are buildings that have been in use, continuously, for over a thousand years; they have settled into their function.

The most powerful place on the mountain is Okunoin, the inner sanctuary. It is a cemetery two kilometers long, threading through ancient cryptomeria, containing perhaps two hundred thousand ancestral towers, mossy memorial stones, and the family monuments of clans dating back nine hundred years. The path is dim even at noon. Stone lanterns along the way include some that have been burning, refilled by successive monks, since the eleventh century.

At the end of the path is Kūkai's mausoleum, the Tōrō-dō. Shingon doctrine holds that Kūkai did not die in 835. He entered eternal meditation — nyūjō, samadhi without end — and continues, in the chamber behind the small wooden hall, to sit in deep contemplation. Twice a day, monks bring him meals. They have been doing this for twelve hundred years.

Whether you accept the doctrine literally is not the point. The forest demands a certain quality of attention. The trees were here first. They know.