Mt. Ontake

Mt. Ontake.

Mt. Ontake belongs to the kō — the lay pilgrim societies. Until the late eighteenth century the mountain was, like Ōmine, a closed sacred peak reserved for advanced ascetics who completed a hundred days of ritual purification before being permitted to climb. The high passes were physically locked. The summit was, for ordinary people, abstract — a name in legend, a shape on the horizon, but never an experience.

This changed because of two ascetics. The first was Fukan Gyōja, who arrived at the foot of the mountain in 1785 and, after his own austerities, declared that anyone willing to undertake a simpler one-week purification could now climb. The temple establishment resisted. Fukan persisted. The second was Kakumei Gyōja, who followed a few years later and shortened the requirement further. Together they cracked Ontake open. Suddenly the highest sacred peak in central Japan was available to weavers, farmers, shopkeepers, anyone with the time and the will to do a modest fast.

The mountain has belonged to the kō ever since. The Ontake-kō pilgrim societies, organized in dozens of cities and villages across central and eastern Japan, have rotated members through summit climbs every summer for over two centuries. The character of the practice is distinctive — communal, popular, organized around the discipline of group austerity rather than solo ascetic isolation. It is one of the most successful religious popularizations in Japanese history.

The mountain itself shows the practice. Every trail is lined with reishin-hi — memorial stones for departed pilgrim society members, often inscribed by the surviving brothers and sisters who climbed with them in life. The stones accumulate. Some trails have hundreds. Each carries a name, a death date, a clan or village affiliation, and often a short verse. Walking among them, you are climbing through the names of an enormous community of people you have never met, who climbed this same mountain, year after year, for the same reasons you are climbing now.

There is also the za practice. At Ontake-kō meetings, a designated member enters a trance and becomes the channel through which one of the mountain's deities or one of the deceased reishin can speak. The other members ask questions. The trance speaker answers. This practice — communal, embodied, mediating directly between the living and the dead through the mountain itself — survives at Ontake more vigorously than at almost any other Japanese sacred site.

Ontake is a volcano, and a living one. The 2014 eruption killed 63 people on the summit; it remains, sobering, the worst volcanic disaster in modern Japan. Climbing parties of pilgrim society members were among the dead. The summit crater still steams. Trails open and close depending on the alert level. The Ontake-kō community, which suffered direct losses, continues the climb anyway. To carry the dead up the mountain that took them — that is, for this community, exactly what the practice has always been.