This year we celebrated our holidays in Japan. We got a Japan Rail Pass and with our 2 oldest boys we traveled first to Koya-san, south of Osaka and about 6 hours of travel from Kamakura.
Mount Koya, set amid black cedars at an altitude of 1000 m., is Japan’s most venerated Shingon-Buddhist site, a major school of Japanese Buddhism and brought into Japan by the priest Kukai when he came back from China with many texts and art works in 804. He established this spiritual center and monastic retreat in 816. There were almost a thousands temples on the mountain by the Edo period, but typhoons and fire have since reduced the number to 123.
Going up the mountain by train.
And very steep cable car.
We stayed the night in the Shojoshinin temple, one of the 53 temple lodgings.
It was such a beautiful temple. It was very cold though and then you are glad to wear slippers on the very cold wooden floors.
Delicious vegetarian prepared food in a warm room heated by a little gas stove.
Beautiful (sumie) paintings on sliding doors everywhere.
The next morning, Christmas morning, we got up at 6am to participate with a Buddhist service. They chanted all the way through their book with hitting the gong in between. This was a beautiful spiritual start on Christmas morning.
After breakfast we packed up our things and got on our way through the necropolis of over 200,000 tombs to Kukai’s mausoleum, Okuki-in. Great status is attached to burial on Koya-san.
All over you find the “Gorintos”, which are used for memorial and funerary purposes. Gorinto is the Japanese name of a type of Buddhist pagoda found in East Asia. In other countries it is called “Stupa”. The stupa was originally a structure or other sacred building containing a relic of Buddha or of a saint, then it was gradually stylized in various ways.
In all its variations, the gorint? includes five rings (although that number can often be difficult to detect by decoration), each having one of the five shapes, employing the basic geometric forms, symbolic of the Five Elements: the earth ring (cube), the water ring (sphere), the fire ring (pyramid), the air ring (crescent), and the ether ring, (or energy, or void).
The stone-paved approach to the mausoleum is flanked with statues, monuments, and tombs housing the remains of Japan’s most powerful families.
In front of Kukai’s mausoleum is the Toro-do (Lantern Hall). Day and night 11,000 lanterns burn here, including two that are said to have remained lit since the 11th century.
On the other side of the mountain is a big park filled with temples.
This is the Konpon-Daito, an impressive two-story vermillion-and-white pagoda rebuilt in 1937. The pagoda is regarded as the symbol of Koya-san.
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