A Night on Kōyasan, the Mountain That Keeps the Dead Company

The path through the cemetery is two kilometres long and lit, after dark, by stone lanterns whose light does not reach the tops of the trees. The cedars are three, four, five hundred years old. Between them, on both sides of the path and up the slopes behind, are graves — an estimated two hundred thousand of them, from the moss-softened stones of medieval warlords to the polished granite of a coffee company that has installed a memorial in the shape of a cup. There are memorials to soldiers, to executives, to a pest-control firm's exterminated termites. There are five-tiered stupas leaning at angles the centuries have given them. At the far end, past a bridge you are asked not to photograph beyond, is a hall where ten thousand lanterns burn and, behind it, the mausoleum of a man who, according to the faith of the place, has not died.

This is Okunoin, on Kōyasan, and I am not sure there is a better place in the world to think about mujō — impermanence, the Buddhist truth that nothing lasts — because the whole mountain is an argument about what, if anything, does.

The mountain

Kōyasan is a basin in the mountains of Wakayama Prefecture, south of Osaka, about eight hundred metres up, ringed by eight peaks that the tradition compares to the petals of a lotus. In 816 the monk Kūkai — posthumously Kōbō Daishi — was granted the site by the emperor to found a monastery for the esoteric Buddhism he had brought back from China. The school he founded, Shingon, still has its headquarters here. So, in the sense that matters to the pilgrims, does he.

The town that grew up around the monastery is a single long street with about a hundred temples on it, roughly half of which take guests. There are no hotels. You stay in a temple, eat what the monks eat, and get up when they do. The approach is a slow train from Osaka into the mountains and then a cable car up the last steep pitch through the forest, and by the time you arrive the city you left feels like something you read about.

Kūkai, still sitting

The heart of the place is a belief. In 835 Kūkai, aged sixty-one, entered a state of deep meditation in a cell at Okunoin and instructed his disciples to seal it. He did not, in the account the tradition has kept, die. He entered nyūjō — eternal meditation — and remains in it, waiting for the coming of the future Buddha, and twice a day, at six and ten-thirty in the morning, monks carry meals to the door of his mausoleum and leave them there.

I do not know what to do with this belief and I have stopped trying. What I can report is what it does to the mountain. Because Kūkai is held to be present, Kōyasan is not a memorial to a founder. It is his house. The pilgrims who walk the cemetery path are walking to visit someone. The two hundred thousand graves are there because being buried near a living saint was, for a thousand years, the best thing a Japanese person could do with their remains — and because a mountain where one man has not died is, for everyone else, the place to be dead.

What the cemetery teaches

Mujō is usually taught as a fact about things passing: blossoms fall, people die, empires end. Okunoin teaches it as a fact about scale.

Walk the path and the time collapses. Here is a stupa for a warlord who died in 1582. Here is a smooth new stone for a woman who died last spring, with fresh flowers. Here is a memorial to the war dead of a company, and next to it a cedar that was a seedling when the warlord was alive and will be here when the company is not. Nothing on the path is permanent and everything on it is older or younger than everything else, and the effect, after an hour, is not gloom but a kind of vertigo — the sense of standing in a river of time and seeing, for once, how fast it moves and how much of it there is.

And then the bridge, and the lantern hall, and the belief. At the very end of the argument about impermanence, the mountain places a man who is said to have stepped out of it. I take that as the tradition's honest acknowledgement of how much mujō costs, and of the wish — universal, unkillable — that somewhere the river might stop.

The night

The temple I stayed in had thirty rooms and, that night, six guests. The room was tatami, a low table, a hanging scroll, a heater. Dinner was shōjin ryōri, the vegetarian cuisine of the monasteries — sesame tofu, mountain vegetables, a clear soup, rice, pickles, tea — served on lacquer trays by a young monk who bowed and left. It was one of the best meals I have eaten, and it contained nothing that had died.

After dinner I walked to Okunoin. In daylight the cemetery is busy with tour groups. At night there is almost no one, and the lanterns make small islands of light in a darkness that the cedars hold very close. I am not a superstitious person and I walked faster than I meant to. At the lantern hall a monk was chanting alone. I stood at the back until he finished and then walked back through the graves with the sound still in my ears.

Morning service was at six, in a hall lit by candles, with the monks chanting sutras in a low rolling drone and a fire ceremony — goma — in which wooden prayer sticks are burned in a flame that leaps a metre high, the smoke filling the hall and the heat on your face. It is the opposite of the still, cool Zen of Kamakura: Shingon is loud, colourful, ritual-heavy, and full of fire. Then breakfast, and the cable car, and the train, and by noon I was in Osaka in a crowd.

Going

Kōyasan is best in autumn, when the maples in the town turn and the cemetery cedars stay dark green behind them, or in the snow, when the path is white and almost nobody comes. Summer is crowded; spring is pleasant. Book the temple lodging in advance through the town's association — most temples take reservations online, in English — and plan two nights if you can, so that one day is not spent entirely in transit.

Walk the cemetery twice: once in daylight to see it, once at night to feel it. Attend the morning service; it is optional, and it is the point. Eat everything. Do not photograph past the bridge.

And go to the Danjō Garan, the ceremonial complex at the other end of town, where the great vermilion pagoda stands that Kūkai began and his successors finished, and where the mountain's other argument is made — not about death but about the possibility, in this life, of seeing things as they are.

What stays

The tradition says that Kūkai stays. I cannot say. What I can say is that a mountain covered in the dead is, against every expectation, one of the most alive places I have been — because the people who built it took mujō seriously enough to build against it, and the trees they planted are still growing, and the meal is still carried up the path at six every morning to a door that has not been opened in twelve hundred years.

You do not have to believe anything. You only have to walk to the bridge, and stop, and look at the lanterns, and notice that you, too, are passing through.