The ubiquity of Kūkai

Book review: a guide to a mountaintop retreat that explains why a Great Teacher continues to live everywhere in memory

How did Shiomi-dake (3,047m), the "salt-viewing peak" in Japan's Southern Alps, get its name? According to Japan's most famous mountain book, hunters in a nearby village used to explain that the local people could never get enough salt. Hearing of this, the great monk Kōbō Daishi climbed the mountain, looked out from its summit at the sea and summoned its salt to the valley below.

Kōbō Daishi, also known as Kūkai, is everywhere in Fukada Kyūya's Nihon Hyakumeizan. His account of another monk's pioneering ascent is quoted in the Nantai chapter. And, in legend at least, Kūkai himself is said to have climbed Iide-san in the Tōhoku region (Chapter 19), buried a scroll of sutras on Issaikyō-yama (Chapter 20), and to have worn out a thousand pairs of straw sandals in vain attempts to scale Tsurugi-dake (Chapter 60).

A quick glance at Kūkai's Wikipedia entry shows that Kūkai wouldn't have had much time to climb mountains. The potted biography does suggest, however, why the famous monk plays a central part in Japanese cultural history. The son of a noble family fallen on hard times, Kōbō Daishi was born in Shikoku in the year 774. Around the age of 30, he joined an official embassy to China, where he deepened his knowledge of Buddhism.

After returning to Japan, he was appointed to run the Tōdaiji temple in Nara, formulated the doctrines that underpin Shingon, one of Japan's four great Buddhist sects, and supervised the building of the Tōji in Kyoto. He also rebuilt what is still the country's largest reservoir, in Shikoku. Some say he invented the kana writing system too. That is quite a lot to pack into sixty-two years.

If you want to find out about somebody, though, you have to visit them at home. And the best way to do that, in Kūkai's case, is to board a battered white train of the Nankai line at Namba station in Osaka and head down to Kōya-san. Founded by Kōbō Daishi in 816, this is the mountaintop monastery where the Great Teacher entered his final meditation in the spring of 835. Some say he meditates there still.


Before boarding that train, or if you live inconveniently far away, you might pick up Sacred Kōya-san by Philip L Nicoloff, a professor of English at the University of New Hampshire. I reached for my own copy after my curiosity about Kōbō Daishi was piqued by his ubiquity in Nihon Hyakumeizan. And I was not disappointed.

For this is quite simply one of the most remarkable books about Japan that I've encountered in the last decade. Yet, strange to say, Google references to reviews in newpapers, magazines or journals are far and few between. The book doesn't seem to get many mentions on blogs either. So here goes.

Sacred Kōya-san: A Pilgrimage to the Mountain Temple of Saint Kōbō Daishi and the Great Sun Buddha - the subtitle gives a good idea of where the book will head - is best described as a contemplative guide. It starts by recalling a typical present-day visit to one of the temple lodgings atop Kōya-san, before introducing Kōbō Daishi's life and the history of the monastery.

The next chapters guide us across the mountaintop's temples and institutions, through the the famous cemetery, towards the inner temple. The cemetery's long and gloomy cedar avenues provide another hint as to why Kōya-san is so important to the life of the nation - everyone is there, from poets to pilots, from scholars to soldiers, from pre-Tokugawa chieftains to corporate leaders. In fact, there are roughly as many memorials to corporate managers and their employees as there are to feudal-era daimyōs. Such is the continuity of Kōya-san's twelve centuries.

Professor Nicoloff must be a very self-effacing sensei. I'm unable to find any reference outside his book as to why and how he undertook his many visits to Mt Kōya. Yet it is his personal experiences that make this book live. There is a memorable account of a night's vigil at Kobō Daishi's mausoleum. Although Nicoloff himself is not granted a vision of the Great Teacher, he relates the story of a veteran returning from the Pacific War in 1946:

I survived the war as a soldier, so I came to Kōya-san to give thanks. At eleven o'clock at night, I suddenly wanted to go to the Oku-no-in, the Inner Temple. I went with caution because I was wearing geta. It was very dark. I became frightened when I heard a bird singing among the old cedar trees. The stone Buddhas on both sides looked mysterious, very different than in the daytime. 

When I went past Naka-no-hashi and passed the memorial for Bashō I saw a very large man wearing a soldier's uniform walking in front of me. Since I was lonely, I asked him what time it was in a loud voice, but he didn't answer me, and walked quickly away. I wanted to catch up with him and say a prayer together, but he had disappeared in the darkness. I felt awkward but went to the Gobyō and gave thanks for my safe return. 

As I recrossed the bridge of the Gobyō I felt that someone was behind me. I turned around and saw the big man in uniform standing facing me and doing the gasshō. Then I thought, Odaishi-sama has just returned from the battlefield himself. I started weeping. I realized how fully Odaishi-sama too had shared the suffering of the war.

It was at this point in reading Professor Nicoloff's book that I started to understand why the Daishi is everywhere - not just on Kōya-san, not just in cultural history texts, but in folk memory outwards to the furthest corners of Japan...

References

Philip L. Nicoloff, Sacred Koyasan: A Pilgrimage to the Mountain Temple of Saint Kobo Daishi and the Great Sun Buddha, State University of New York Press, November 2007.

A meizanologist's diary (41)

9 November: Narita, 6am: as it’s too early to head to the airport, I head in the other direction, towards the eponymous temple. After all, folk refer to it as “Narita-san” (Mt Narita), hinting at something of meizanological interest. 

The old street winds away between souvenir shops, galleries and restaurants offering various renditions of eel – as favoured by old-time pilgrims from Edo, according to the helpful brochure I picked up in the hotel, to strengthen their knees.

Strengthening your knees might be a good idea. The countryside here may look flat from a passing airliner but, like Kent or Kentucky, the landscape actually ripples away into wolds and swales (not the local words for them, of course). 

Thus would-be visitors to Shinshō-ji, as the temple is formally called, must first scale a steep and sustained flight of stone steps. Fortunately, a fine rock garden provides an excuse for tarrying at half height.

At this hour, of course, actual visitors are few. But a chrysanthemum exhibition and a poster advertising the shichi-go-san ceremonies underline that this is a busily working temple with a full yearly calendar, not a tourist trap for passing travellers. But still I wonder what the deal is with this temple’s “mountain” suffix.

The answer comes from a straw-hatted pilgrim, or rather a bronze statue of one. No, not just a pilgrim, but the Daishi himself, the monk who – says H Byron Earhart in his  magisterial book on Mt Fuji – most radically altered the trajectory of Japan’s mountain religions.

Before Kōbō Daishi, mountains were themselves the objects of worship. But Kūkai, as he was also known, saw them more as places of spiritual retreat. “According to the sutra, meditation should be practised preferably on a flat area deep in the mountains … for the benefit of the nation and those who desire to discipline themselves,” he wrote.

And so, to this day, temples of the Shingon sect that Kūkai founded are known as "mountains", often including the character for 'yama' in their names. I should have guessed - we've visited such a "mountain temple" before.  

In fact, Shinshō-ji was founded by a disciple of Kūkai, not the Daishi himself. But the master's spirit seems to have faithfully imprinted itself on this far-flung outpost of the Shingon sect. I’m now wandering up another flight of stone steps towards the temple’s highest walks, which are surmounted by a “peace pagoda”.

Is it my imagination, or do the gardens take on a wilder character here, as if recalling the magnificent cryptomeria forests that surround the founder’s monastery on Kōya-san? It seems I’m not the only one to think so. This writer captures their atmosphere perfectly:

The natural Nature which is apt to be forgotten carelessly. Something recalling me to this is left in the Naritasan park. The park overflows in the trees and plants and Nature, and thought to respect all life of the thing which straight of the Buddhism arranges is incorporated …When the stairs near the light temple in the precincts are gone down, a waterfall of the donation that light comes in from a grove turns up from a huge rocky mountain…”

The light of a late autumn sunrise is starting to slant in over the groves. It is time to go down the mountain. In front of the Daihondō, a gardener is filling his watering cans for the daily round. “What splendid gardens,” I say as I pass, and he smiles. At Narita-san, natural Nature is in no danger of being forgotten carelessly.

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1 February: it's still dark when we shuffle our way into the Fukuchi-in’s ornate main hall. Even at a few minutes before 7 am, we are almost too late. All the seats close to the oil stove are taken, which means that the air around the remaining ones is close to the temperature outside. That’s fine: we are both dressed for an alpine bivouac. Soon three monks file in and make their obeisances towards the inner sanctuary.

Although attendance at the temple’s morning service is entirely voluntary, it seems that most of the Fukuchi-in's guests are present, whether Japanese or foreign. 

And why would we not be? According to Philip Nicoloff, the Rishu-zammai-hōyo, designated by Kōbō Daishi himself as Shingon’s primary daily service, helps to deflect bad karma, advances individuals towards enlightenment, solicits material benefit, assuages the sufferings of the dead, and serves as a vehicle for meditation...

After breakfast, we walk out into a frigid breeze and set out for the Oku-no-in on foot. Black ice glazes the pavements. When the Sensei takes a tumble, we find refuge on a passing bus. This takes us to the Oku-no-in’s carpark, in this season a vast empty concrete space.

Monks in a snowstorm (detail).
Photography and copyright, Nagasaka Yoshimitsu.

Repairing to a café, we warm up with a cappuccino while admiring the photos exhibited on the wall. They are the work of a local photographer, Nagasaka Yoshimitsu. On the evidence of his pictures, Kōya-san was even colder back in Shōwa times.

Thus fortified, we take the back route into the Oku-no-in’s cryptomeria groves. This leads us into a long avenue of corporate monuments. The first, featuring an Apollo-Saturn rocket, commemorates employees of the company formerly known as Shin-Meiwa and before that as Kawanishi. They're more famous for their handsome flying boats than for rocketry, though. 

We take note too of an on-brand stele put up by the Ueshima Coffee Company, whose products have just revived us. Not to mention a memorial to the makers of a fermented milk drink. Professor Nicoloff writes that modern corporations have built almost as many monuments on Kōya-san (108) as did the feudal daimyōs of old (110). 

Even so, not everything here is business-sponsored. A side-chapel slightly away from the main path is dedicated to or by the Jōdo sect. There's a saying that Tendai Buddhism is for the Court, Shingon for the nobles, Zen for the warriors, and Jōdo for the people. Up here, though, matters may be less clear-cut.

So what is the side-chapel doing here? Has it anything to do with the twelfth-century episode when selected elements of Jōdo doctrine and worship helped to re-energise the Shingon faith? Again, I get the feeling that the Kōya-san we see today resembles an iceberg that floats over a very deep keel of history.

Sun is starting to filter through the trees as we walk around the Tōrōdō’s gallery of bronze lanterns. On the north side, we wait for a group of pilgrims to pay their respects to the Daishi’s mausoleum – if mausoleum is the right word, given the belief that he continues to meditate for eternity there. Then we start our walk back through the Oku-no-in.

By now, the sun and some rock salt have turned the frozen snow into slush, making the footing less lethal. We've warmed up enough to stop and examine the monuments that line the stone-flagged path through the trees. Today, it seems, the dead greatly outnumber the living in this wood between the worlds.

Receding between the trees as far as the eye can see, the memorials bring to mind the rest of the parable from yesterday evening’s glance at the Fukuchi-in’s breviary:

Then, Yama asked him once more if he had ever seen a dead man. The man replied: "Yes, my Lord, I have been in the presence of death many times." Yama said to him: "It is because you did not recognize in these men. the heavenly messengers sent to warn you that you are brought to this. If you had recognized these messengers and taken their warnings, you would have changed your course, and would not have come to this place of suffering.”

The Sensei is surprised to see a stele that commemorates Akechi Mitsuhide, who assassinated his own overlord, Oda Nobunaga. Soon we realise that everyone is here, regardless of their politics or persuasions – poets and pilgrims, adversaries and antagonists, whether Allied soldiers or Navy pilots.

We pass a memorial to the haiku master Matsuo Bashō on the main path, but must scale a flight of steps away from it to visit the overlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi. The row of steles that commemorates him is surprisingly modest for somebody so ostentatious in life. Kōya-san is a great leveller.

Further on is a sign that marks the spot where the Daishi interrupted his eternal meditation to come and pronounce the funeral obsequies over the body of his departed friend, the Emperor Saga (786–842). Even today, records Philip Nicoloff, no other emperor is held in such esteem on Kōya-san. He once sent the monk a set of warm clothes, accompanied with a wistful poem:

This quiet monk has lived on the peak in the clouds

For a long time. 

Here far from you, I think of the deep mountain still cold

Even though it is Spring.

The pines and the cedars keep silent.

How long have you been breathing the mist and fog ...

Under a cloudless sky, a stone bridge brings us back to the high street.

We drop in at Kōya-san’s oldest coffee shop for another capuccino before the cable-car (or funicular railway) wafts us to the waiting local train. 

We’re still several hundred metres above sea-level when the doors rumble open at a deserted platform to reveal a grove of palm trees, their leaves fluttering in the warm afternoon breeze. 

It’s a different planet down here.

***

1 February (later): The train is making its way up to the watershed between the Koya mountains and the Osaka basin when the woman sitting opposite us nudges her partner and says ‘yuki no yama’.

Looking over my shoulder in the direction she’s pointing, I see a line of snowy peaks, complete with fluted white walls and avalanche-raked gullies. Surely there can’t be mountains of this almost Himalayan loft in the Kii Peninsula? Then we realise that we’re looking right across Nagoya Bay through a gap in the hills to Shizuoka. So these must be the Southern Alps.

Then a tunnel steals the vision away and I’m left contemplating the famous episode from Tale of the Heike, as quoted in Japan’s most famous mountain book:

"In dismal spirits, Shigehira traversed the ivied path at Mount Utsu and journeyed beyond Tegoshi. Snowy peaks appeared far to the north; and, upon making enquiry, he was told they were the Shirane Mountains in Kai. He expressed his feelings in verse, restraining tears:

I do not desire
To cling to this wretched life
Yet, most happily,
I have survived to behold
The Shirane mountains of Kai."

Beheld on a winter’s day, those Shirane summits of Kai appear to us like mountains far beyond the world.

A meizanologist's diary (99)

18 March: even by our (S)low Mountaineering standards, an ascent of Fujikura (643 metres) sounds unambitious. And surely we won’t need the wakan – after all the snow has all but melted in the streets of Imajō, where we park the car. But I defer to the Sensei, and stuff a pair of the traditional snowshoes in my pack anyway.

This time we’ll go anticlockwise, she says, to make the route-finding easier. Route-finding, I think to myself: how can we get lost, in perfect weather, on a mere hummock? 

And, indeed, the start is easy enough to find: a statue of Kōbō Daishi stands below a flight of stone steps that leads up onto a sunny ridge. No need for the wakan here, although I note that this North Country Daishi appears to be wearing a pair of gaiters.

A Jizō figurine guards every turn of the path, every one protected in its niche against the snow by a bamboo screen. Each makes sure you are safe on your journey until the next one takes over, explains the Sensei – a bit like one air traffic controller handing your flight on to the next, I think irreverently.

The temple of Kōbōji sits on a sunny hummock overlooking the town. We sit and munch our biscuits – an interesting update on traditional yomogi sweetmeats - under the eaves of the main hall, which is still shuttered up for the winter season. 

From here onwards, we’re walking over spring snow. On the ridge linking the temple’s knoll to the mountain of Nabekura, we find a large pawprint. A bear? Or more probably, the Sensei thinks, a rabbit’s track that has broadened as it melted. 

At least in this season we’re not going to meet the vipers that haunt this sunny ridge in summer – the Sensei once met with one peacefully sunbathing on a twig, at eye level.

On Nabekura, we have to kick our way up a steep snowbank. As the sun hasn’t yet reached this slope, there’s almost a north face ambience to it. While pausing for breath, we notice that Hakusan has risen into prominence above the intervening ridges. Under the bare trees, yellow flowers dancing in the breeze herald the arrival of spring.

Or so we think, as we cross from the intermediate peak of Nabekura over to Fujikura. Suddenly we’re sinking deep into the snow at every step, and it’s time to bind on those wakan. I have to say that I’m a wakan neophyte. Back in my Tokyo days, we didn't hold with them – it was either skis for us on the rounded mountains of the Jōetsu or crampons on the colder, shallower snows of Yatsugatake. 

But that was then and this is now. I soon discover that, unlike modern snowshoes, wakan lend themselves quite well to kicking steps up steep snow. We aim ourselves upwards through the beech trees for the ridgeline, wending our way round crevasses that are opening up as the snowpack starts to creep downhill.

Back in the sunlight on the broad ridgetop, we sit down on a fallen branch and wash our onigiri down with instant coffee. By the time we have finished lunch, the snow has started to soften. Sinking a bit deeper into it, we crunch our way through the quiet hallways of beech to the summit. As on Gomando-yama, this one enshrines a large steel reflector board, so that the citizens of Imajō can view their TV soaps.

From the summit, I set off boldly down a broad open slope. I’m beginning to get the idea of wakan. Back in January, with its soft, powdery snow, modern MSR-type snowshoes were a necessity. But on the firmer snows of spring, wakan work better – particularly in dealing with the type of steep, dense terrain we are now …

A yell from above interrupts my disquisition. Seeing no tracks to follow, the Sensei has wisely consulted her GPS, which tells her that my broad open slope will lead us to perdition. A hasty course correction to the left is made. On this sunward slope, the brushwood is starting to emerge from the snowpack – as I was saying, the wakan deal with the occasional tangle of greenery better than big plastic snowshoes would.

Fujikura has yet another lesson to teach us. Wakanning our way too easily down the snowy ridge, we make the classic mistake of missing our turn-off point and have to climb back a few metres to retrieve ourselves. Only GPS will work here – there are no tracks, and no scraps of red tape on tree branches to show the way. It’s as if such aids for the improvident are disdained on this mountain. 

A little later than expected, we step up onto the knoll where Hiuchi Castle once stood. This Atago-yama has a commanding view down onto Imajō, and no doubt an excellent field of fire too. Back in shadow, we come down into the Inari Shrine, still boarded up for the winter and half-buried in a snowbank. Meltwater cascades down the stone steps as we work our way gingerly down them back into town.

The streets of Imajō are all but deserted on this Tuesday afternoon. Walking back to the car, we get the impression that nothing much has ever happened in this town, hovering as it does in the liminal zone between the prefecture’s “northern march” and its southern one. But it was right here, in 1865, that the feudal authorities put down the rebellion of the Mito loyalists, later executing 353 of the eight hundred or so captives and salting down the leaders' heads in wooden tubs. 

One really shouldn't judge a town and its history by its outward appearance. Or a mountain by its height. 

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4 November, Nara: the rutting deer may bite, butt, kick or knock you down, or so the signs warn. Lolling in the balmy sunshine, though, the animals look more chilled than most of the tourists.

We’ll need to channel their composure as the queue for the annual Shōsō-in exhibition seems to wrap around the length and breadth of the Nara National Museum. Once inside the exhibition hall, we find it more crowded than we remembered it from previous visits, just like yesterday’s summit.

But, heck, we’re not complaining: it’s only since 1946 that the Imperial Household Agency has allowed commoners like us to gaze and gawp at these exquisite voyagers through time from the palace and temples of the eighth century Tempyō era.

Someone once said that, if you took in twelve Shōsō-in exhibitions, you would see most of what the collection has to offer. Yet each new exhibition somehow confounds that notion, which shouldn’t be surprising, given that the curators have 9,000 items or so to choose from. So, as with yesterday’s white centipedes, there is always something new to see.

True, that screen panel, the one with two deer under a tree, must have been exhibited several times over the years - most recently in 2013, says the catalogue - but it’s well worth another look. It reads like a message from the Empress Kōmyō (701–760) herself. She donated it along with several hundred other items to the Tōdaiji temple after the death of the Emperor in 756 because, as she wrote then, “these objects remind me of the bygone days, and the sight of them causes me bitter grief.” Yet her two deer look out at us serenely, as chilled as their modern counterparts outside.

Gigaku mask of drunken retainer
Image courtesy of Imperial Household Agency

No less famous are the gigaku masks, the silver mirror and the miraculously well-preserved zithern, as Arthur Waley would have called it. These objects recall a court that lived a life of such breathtaking refinement that the outside world almost fades into invisibility.

Zithern from Silla
Image courtesy of Imperial Household Agency

But what is this? Item 23 purports to be a “Three-pronged performance spearhead,” or in other words a ritual sceptre known as a sankosho. ‘Performance’ refers to the fact that this one is made of wood, and thus lighter to heft during temple rituals than a bronze original.

Symbolising a thunderbolt, this sankosho points to the existence of realms altogether wilder than any the courtiers knew. It was a legendary sankosho, presumably of bronze, that helped to find the site of Japan’s most famous mountain temple. When Kōbō Daishi went to China, his ship all but foundered in a storm. Praying for deliverance, the Daishi vowed he would dedicate a new temple to the Kannon if he survived.

On returning to Japan, he threw his sankosho into the air - one can imagine him launching it as one would a small drone - and found that it had landed in Tamba Province, to the north of Kyoto. And when he came to that region, a white deer showed him the way to a valley where he found his ritual sceptre hanging in a tree. After that, the sankosho took off again, this time in the direction of Mt Koya, still the most famous mountain sanctuary in all Japan …

Back in the open air, the Sensei so far forgets herself as to go up to a recumbent deer and pat it on the head. Like all the others in the park, the animal accepts this obeisance without any sign of irritation or even acknowledgement. These deer, they are surely as chilled as the ones in Empress Kōmyō’s screen panel.