Koyasan: Of Myth and Magic

Day 10 & 11: July 4th & 5th. Without internet, I attempted to keep my travel log by hand, which produced interesting effects. I seldom am able to write my thoughts immediately. This is probably a good thing, otherwise everything would be overly poetic and flowery.

There is a stillness at Koyasan that is interminably moving. On Thursday morning the rain fell in droves culminating in gurgles and plops and pitter-patters as it dropped off leaves, slid from balustrades, trickled down gutters and landed on the gravel beds of the garden below the room I share with three of my classmates.
 

View of the garden from our room.

The quiet of this little town of four thousand is one of the many manifestations of "Ma", where such silence or nothingness is vital. As with watercolor painting, I've learned that what you can't see or hear is just as important as what you can. The lack of traffic noise from the adjacent road allows the sounds of nature prominence.

In the small pond garden on the way to the girls' wing, small frogs call and respond in a chorus of croaks.

Garden on the way to the girls' wing.

Garden on the way to the guys' wing.

Garden in between the girls' and guys' wing.

I've begun to regret the sounds of human voices in such spaces. Jimyoin [the temple at Koyasan we stayed at] is a place that should not be easily dismissed. While Daishin-in is our home in Japan, Jimyo-in is like a visit to paradise.

Yesterday we walked the graves to the gateway of Kobo Diashi [Okunoin]. It is a mile stretch of woods steeped in history, mysticism, and ancestry. The old sits beside the new framed by an ancient landscape: monuments so old they are made more of moss than stone, their characters eroded to illegibility; the heart-tugging small stone carvings dressed in red aprons to represent the children who died young; the new modern mausoleums of the Panasonic Corporation.

Graves at Okunoin: old and new

Finally, at the main temple of Okunoin, like a gathering of fireflies, thousands of lanterns illuminate the ceilings. There is also a separate building filled to the rafters with shelves of glowing lanterns, the aisles so narrow in some spots that you have to turn sideways to pass alongside them. These lanterns represent the donors to the temple and their names are inscribed on the sides. It is both an honor and a blessing to donate to Okunoin. Visitors can find the lanterns of their relatives by following the maps posted intermittently on the walls. [I don't have any photographs of these lanterns because there were very polite signs posted prohibiting photography and I felt that I wanted to tread lightly in a place where the kami so clearly resides.]

Okunoin is considered to be the most sacred site in Japan. The spirit of Kobo Daishi (the founder of the Shingon sect of Buddhism) is said to reside beyond the gateway behind the main building, protecting the people and the land.

More of Jimyoin:

Delicious dinner in our nemaki (sleeping yukata)

Three of our futons laid out in one of our two rooms.