This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Shugendo's own account of its beginning centers on one figure, En no Gyoja, an ascetic tradition places in seventh century Katsuragi, in what is now Nara Prefecture. He was banished by the imperial court to the island of Izu Oshima in 699, accused, an eighth century chronicle says, of sorcery born of envy for his powers. Whatever the truth behind the charge, the mountains he is said to have walked, above all Kinpusen on Mount Yoshino and the peak of Mount Omine, became the tradition's founding ground, and folklore reaching back to around the year 800 had already begun crediting him with feats no ordinary ascetic could perform.
For over a thousand years the practice he is said to have founded grew inside, rather than beside, Japan's established Buddhist schools, organised through Shingon and Tendai temple networks that treated mountain austerity as a path toward the same awakening their own doctrine described. That embeddedness is exactly what the Meiji government moved against in 1872. As part of a broader campaign to separate Buddhism from Shinto and remake Japanese religion along clearer lines, the state banned Shugendo outright, dissolving its organised practice and forcing its temples to declare themselves one thing or the other.
The ban held for over seventy years. It was the restoration of religious freedom after the Second World War that let Shugendo's institutions reorganise in the open: Shingon affiliated lineages regrouped around Sanbo-in, Tendai affiliated lineages around Shogoin, and Kinpusen-ji reasserted its own independent standing as the head temple of Kinpusen Shugendo. Yamabushi walk the same mountains today, in a tradition twice made and once, briefly by government order, unmade.