Day 3 in Japan: The Dead greats of Koyasan

On our third day in Japan, Ciaran and I visited Mount Koya, also known as Koyasan. Situated south of Osaka, Mount Koya first became a religious settlement in 819 under the leadership of monk Kukai, who travelled to China to study Tangmi – the Chinese version of Vajrayana Buddhism – and returned to found the esoteric Shingon School in Japan. Followers of the Shingon School believe that Kukai (also referred to as Kobo Daishi) never died but rests in meditation until the arrival of Maitreya, the Buddha of the Future. His mausoleum is found at Okunoin. The cemetery that has arisen around Okunoin contains over 200,000 tombstones and is the largest in Japan.

Advised by a kind ticket officer, Ciaran and I bought a special roundtrip tourist ticket to Koyasan with discounts for entries into the major attractions. We expected to change at Hashimoto – the last major town under the mountains – but we were merely asked to leave our carriage and move forward to one of the front two, following which the last carriage was disconnected and left behind. After slowly winding our way up the relatively gentle mountainside, the train arrived under a steep mountain. There, all the tourists were guided to the cable car, which climbed the steepest stretch of the route to Koyasan Station and its bus stop. The last portion of this two-hour-long journey involved a short bus ride to the town of Koya.

We alighted just on the far end of Koya, where the trail through the Okunoin cemetery begins and runs parallel to the road until reaching a little stream that guides it towards Okunoin Temple. The cemetery is massive and unlike anything I have ever seen outside of Japan, with graves lying dispersed and covered in deep green moss among the hefty trunks of massive evergreen trees. The typical grave in this area has a rectangular base that supports a ball with a four-sided convex roof, which itself carries a fused cylinder and onion shape. Many groups of tombs have a little statue in front with a basket for donations. These often wear red hats, red aprons, or both.

I was glad that Okunoin – and indeed, almost every single sight we visited – had a bathroom, for I have not been able to rid myself of the stomach issues I apparently picked up on my last day in Pakistan. My experience of Koyasan was thus significantly elevated by the cleanliness and technological advancement of its toilets. These became all the more necessary because when we bought bread in the morning to eat for lunch, I accidentally grabbed a pretzel filled with butter and a little bread roll filled with cream. I should have just gone for a bag of plain toast.

After eating our lunch on a little road leading north of Okunoin, we made our way to the Tokugawa Clan Mausoleum just north of central Koya. The mausoleum was built by Tokugawa Ieyasu’s grandson Tokugawa Iemisu in 1643 to honour his father and grandfather. Neither of these shoguns, however, lies buried at this site with its elaborate gilt woodcarvings, having found their final resting place at Nikko. The same is true of Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi: both have tombstones at Okunoin but Oda Nobunaga’s actual burial place is unknown while Toyotomi Hideyoshi lies buried at a shrine in Kyoto.

It was quite late by the time we arrived in Koya proper, and we only had time to visit a few more sights. Using our ticket discount, we visited Kongobuji, a shrine constructed in 1593 by Toyotomi Hideyoshi in honour of his mother. The shrine now serves as the head temple of Shingon Buddhism and is home to the Banryuktei Rock Garden, the largest rock garden in Japan, whose channels of raked gravel are always kept in perfect order. The interior of the temple is notable for its screens decorated with elegant paintings of birds and flowers, each room having a different theme: water lilies and irises, autumn leaves, flying herons, winter scenes, and so on.

From Kongobuji, we made the short walk to the Great Pagoda, a striking 49-metre-tall double-roofed structure with white walls and bright red beams. The interior resembles that of a Tibetan Buddhist Temple with its red pillars bearing large depictions of colourful icons, who surround the Buddha in a mandala-like formation. The Great Pagoda itself stands amid a number of smaller and less brightly coloured pagodas, with the eastern end of the complex seemingly eaten away by the majestic pine forest. We walked a little farther along the road to reach the main gate leading to Koya, after which we boarded the bus and undertook our entire two-hour journey again in reverse.