Fire, Rebuilding, and the Marathon Monks

Mount Hiei's monks were also, for much of the medieval period, an armed political force, maintaining warrior monks, sohei, who intervened repeatedly in the capital's politics and fought rival temples over land and influence. That power ended in 1571, when the warlord Oda Nobunaga, seeking to break the temple's independent authority and end its alliance with his enemies, sent his army up the mountain and burned the complex to the ground, killing, by most accounts, several thousand monks, women and children sheltering there in what remains one of the starkest instances of religious violence in Japanese history.

Rebuilding began under Toyotomi Hideyoshi and continued under the Tokugawa shogunate, which favored Tendai and restored Enryaku-ji as an active monastery, though on a smaller footprint than its medieval extent. The complex today is inscribed on UNESCO's World Heritage List as part of the Historic Monuments of Ancient Kyoto, alongside sites within the city itself. Its most demanding surviving practice is the kaihogyo, the thousand day circumambulation undertaken by a small number of monks over seven years, walking a marked mountain route for as long as nine hours a day during its most intense phases, a practice popularly known outside Japan as the discipline of the marathon monks and understood within Tendai as itself a form of meditation in motion.