Koyasan

Kukai traveled to Tang China in 804 CE, part of the same embassy that carried Saicho, the future founder of Tendai, and studied there under the esoteric master Huiguo, who initiated him into the teachings and ritual system later known in Japan as Shingon, "True Word," a tradition built on mandala based visualization, mantra recitation and a body of ritual transmitted directly from teacher to initiate rather than through text alone. Returning to Japan in 806, Kukai petitioned the court for a mountain retreat suited to Shingon practice and, in 816, was granted the plateau of Mount Koya, remote and difficult to reach, which he developed as Kongobu-ji, the headquarters monastery of the new school.

Where Saicho's Tendai, based on Mount Hiei near the capital, absorbed successive reforming movements that eventually broke away from it, Shingon under Kukai remained comparatively stable and centered on Mount Koya itself, developing into one of the two great schools of Japanese esoteric Buddhism alongside Tendai's own esoteric wing.

Kukai, known posthumously by the honorific title Kobo Daishi, "the Great Master Who Spread the Dharma," is remembered in Japanese tradition not simply as Shingon's founder but as a calligrapher, engineer and cultural figure credited, likely apocryphally in most cases, with feats from irrigation projects to the invention of the kana syllabary.

Koyasan is the headquarters of Japanese esoteric Buddhism, and it operates on a proposition it takes entirely literally.

Shingon is Vajrayana

Koyasan Shingon is esoteric Buddhism, Vajrayana. It works with mantra, mudra, mandala and initiatory transmission, and describes awakening as attainable in this body and this life.

Describing it simply as Japanese Mahayana is not wrong in the broadest sense and is unhelpful in practice, since what distinguishes Shingon is exactly the esoteric method.

Kukai, known posthumously as Kobo Daishi, obtained the mountain in the early ninth century after study in Chang'an, and founded the community in a wooded basin ringed by eight peaks, chosen because the shape was read as a lotus.

The proposition

Kukai is held not to have died in 835. He is understood to have entered nyujo, eternal meditation, in his mausoleum at Okunoin, where he remains, awaiting Maitreya, the future Buddha, some five and a half billion years hence.

This is doctrine, not metaphor, and it is acted on:

• Priests carry meals to him twice a day, at six and at half past ten, and have done for over a thousand years.
• The food is prepared, processed to the mausoleum in ritual order, and taken inside.
• Only the highest-ranking priest may enter, and he does not describe what he sees.

Whatever one makes of the claim, the institution built on it is unambiguous, and it has not lapsed in eleven centuries.

Okunoin

The cemetery runs about two kilometres from the Ichinohashi bridge to the mausoleum, under enormous cryptomeria, and holds something like two hundred thousand graves and memorials.

The inhabitants are miscellaneous in a way that says a good deal about Japanese religion. Feudal lords lie there, including men who fought each other. So do corporate memorials, companies maintaining plots for deceased employees, and a memorial raised by a pesticide firm for the termites its products killed.

Nobody is turned away on grounds of what they believed.

Shukubo

About a hundred and twenty sub-temples remain, and many take overnight guests under the shukubo arrangement, temple lodging that predates the modern tourist industry by centuries and was built for pilgrims.

Guests eat shojin ryori, the temple's vegetarian food, sleep on futons in temple rooms, and attend the morning service. The monks run it themselves.

It makes Koyasan one of the few major monastic centres anywhere where a visitor participates in the daily round rather than observing it.

Women

The mountain excluded women until the Meiji government abolished such restrictions in 1872. Women had previously walked a circuit of the perimeter, the nyonin michi, with small halls at the gates from which they could look in. Parts of that path survive.

UNESCO inscribed the mountain in 2004 within the Kii range sites.

Koyasan's cemetery is large enough that at least one company has apparently decided a memorial there is worth having even for its coffee brand.

A mountain granted for a purpose

The monk Kukai, later honoured as Kobo Daishi, founded Shingon Buddhism in Japan after studying esoteric teachings in Tang dynasty China, and received Mount Koya from Emperor Saga in 816 as a secluded site for monastic training, establishing the temple complex that has operated continuously in some form ever since.

The largest cemetery in Japan

The approach to Kukai's mausoleum at Okunoin runs through a cemetery of more than two hundred thousand tombstones and memorial markers under old-growth cedar, among the largest burial grounds in the country. Alongside historical daimyo and monks, the cemetery includes modern memorial monuments erected by Japanese corporations, including firms with no direct religious connection to the site, commemorating employees or, in some cases, using memorial forms shaped like company products, a modern layer added onto an otherwise very old practice of seeking proximity to Kukai in death.

Lodging built for pilgrims

Koyasan's temple complex includes numerous shukubo, temple lodgings that host pilgrims and tourists overnight, serving shojin ryori vegetarian monastic cuisine and, in many cases, inviting guests to attend the morning fire ritual, a practice that has made staying overnight at a functioning monastery a standard part of visiting rather than an exceptional one.