Koyasan is the headquarters of Japanese esoteric Buddhism, and it operates on a proposition it takes entirely literally.
Shingon is Vajrayana
Koyasan Shingon is esoteric Buddhism, Vajrayana. It works with mantra, mudra, mandala and initiatory transmission, and describes awakening as attainable in this body and this life.
Describing it simply as Japanese Mahayana is not wrong in the broadest sense and is unhelpful in practice, since what distinguishes Shingon is exactly the esoteric method.
Kukai, known posthumously as Kobo Daishi, obtained the mountain in the early ninth century after study in Chang'an, and founded the community in a wooded basin ringed by eight peaks, chosen because the shape was read as a lotus.
The proposition
Kukai is held not to have died in 835. He is understood to have entered nyujo, eternal meditation, in his mausoleum at Okunoin, where he remains, awaiting Maitreya, the future Buddha, some five and a half billion years hence.
This is doctrine, not metaphor, and it is acted on:
- Priests carry meals to him twice a day, at six and at half past ten, and have done for over a thousand years.
- The food is prepared, processed to the mausoleum in ritual order, and taken inside.
- Only the highest-ranking priest may enter, and he does not describe what he sees.
Whatever one makes of the claim, the institution built on it is unambiguous, and it has not lapsed in eleven centuries.
Okunoin
The cemetery runs about two kilometres from the Ichinohashi bridge to the mausoleum, under enormous cryptomeria, and holds something like two hundred thousand graves and memorials.
The inhabitants are miscellaneous in a way that says a good deal about Japanese religion. Feudal lords lie there, including men who fought each other. So do corporate memorials, companies maintaining plots for deceased employees, and a memorial raised by a pesticide firm for the termites its products killed.
Nobody is turned away on grounds of what they believed.
Shukubo
About a hundred and twenty sub-temples remain, and many take overnight guests under the shukubo arrangement, temple lodging that predates the modern tourist industry by centuries and was built for pilgrims.
Guests eat shojin ryori, the temple's vegetarian food, sleep on futons in temple rooms, and attend the morning service. The monks run it themselves.
It makes Koyasan one of the few major monastic centres anywhere where a visitor participates in the daily round rather than observing it.
Women
The mountain excluded women until the Meiji government abolished such restrictions in 1872. Women had previously walked a circuit of the perimeter, the nyonin michi, with small halls at the gates from which they could look in. Parts of that path survive.
UNESCO inscribed the mountain in 2004 within the Kii range sites.