A meizanologist's diary (86)

23 November: “Ni mo kakawarazu …” The very phrase is enough to raise our hackles. “Although” the author of this benighted signboard begins, “Monju-san is a relatively low mountain at 365 metres, it counts as one of the Five Mountains of Echizen thanks to its beautiful form and, from its western aspect, it is also known as the Tsunohara-Fuji.”

Now we Monju fans are unwilling to countenance any qualifications at all about our local mountain. Heck, few Meizan of our acquaintance pack so much history into so few metres. True, we must set off from the Taishōji Tozanguchi through the usual factory forest of cryptomeria, but we soon rise into a handsome maple wood of mixed momiji and kaede. 

A few gleams of sunlight start to push through the clouds as we pass the shrine housing a Kannon statue. Yes, you read that right – a shrine-like building housing a Buddhist statue. For reasons that need further study, folk around here seem to have turned a blind eye to the Meiji government’s attempts to disentangle the Shinto from the Buddhist faith. The mountain proclaims its syncretism even more clearly at its “Oku no in” (inner sanctuary), which enshrines both a Buddhist and a Shinto deity.

Just here two elderly men happen by. Where are you from, they ask. When I reply, the younger of the two says “Then you have read the works of Rock”. Would that be hard rock or extreme rock, I’m wondering, when he amplifies “Rocke and Hume”. My interlocutor likes to read these philosophers in the original English, although he admits he struggles to decipher their sense of irony. 

We wander on up the path discussing local philosophers – it seems that the eminent Nishida Kitarō was a Hokuriku man too, as was his friend Suzuki Daisetz, the author of the classic book on Zen and Japanese Culture …

The second man doesn’t have much to say for himself. Instead he’s concentrating on his foot and stick placements. It turns out that he is ninety years of age, having retired aeons ago from teaching maths at a local high school, and has climbed Monju five thousand times (the philosopher claims a mere four thousand, but he must be a decade or more younger).

We make our way at a very measured pace up to the main shrine, where the Sensei has been bemusedly waiting, wondering what happened. Sorry, I say, I didn’t know that Monju too is a mountain for philosophers …