Mt. Yudono

Mt. Yudono.

Mt. Yudono is the final stage of the Dewa Sanzan pilgrimage — the world to come. Of the three sacred mountains, it is the most extreme in what it asks and what it withholds. There is no built shrine here. There is no statue. The object of worship is a single living thing: a great red boulder, the size of a small house, with hot spring water flowing continuously down its surface, heating the air around it.

The pilgrim approaches barefoot. Shoes are removed at the gate; you walk the final stones in your skin. The rock is warm; the water on it is hotter. You climb up onto the boulder itself, and the priest performs a private blessing. The walls of the small valley press in on three sides. Steam rises from the boulder and from a half-dozen small hot pools nearby. You stand on the divinity. You are wet to the knees with the water of the divinity. The deity is a place, and you are inside it.

What happens next is the part that cannot be written down. For more than a thousand years, the rule of Yudono has been this: do not speak of what you saw. Do not photograph. Do not describe to outsiders. The Edo poet Bashō, who walked the Dewa Sanzan in 1689, was honor-bound to the silence and could only write a single haiku about Yudono: tears wet my sleeves — the unspoken Yudono. He left the rest to imagination.

The forbidden quality is not mystification. It is a practical theology. The teaching of Yudono is that some experiences cannot survive being told. To narrate them is to flatten them, to convert them into anecdote, to lose them. Better to carry them whole, inside, where they continue to do their slow work.

Around the rock the small valley steams. Tiny stone Buddhas line the approach path. The shrine of Yudono is also the home of the medieval immortalized monks — the so-called living Buddhas of Dewa, ascetics who, in a remarkable practice now ended, mummified themselves slowly while still alive through extreme fasting on a diet of pine bark, lacquer sap, and mineral water. Several of their bodies still sit in nearby temples, dark and skeletal in their robes.

You leave Yudono with nothing in your hands. That is the point. The future world has been entered, briefly, and then exited; what it gave you, it gave silently.