Monastery on Mount Koya provides enlightenment into culture

Sunday, January 11, 2004

By Arin Greenwood

KOYASAN, Japan -- When we arrived in Koyasan, it was raining. When we arrived anywhere, it was raining. It was July, Japan's rainy season. Koyasan is a village perched atop Mount Koya, part of a mountain range in Japan's Wakayama Prefecture. Kobo Daishi, the monk who brought esoteric Buddhism to Japan from China, founded the village in 860 A.D. as a monastic complex.

Right away, we could see why Koyasan was chosen as a seat of meditative religion. The place was filled with gorgeous mountain vistas, with temple upon temple upon shrine tucked into the woods. In the rain, the town was coated in a romantic cloudy dew that clung to houses, temples, trees and us.

Standing in the woods in front of a pair of stone lions guarding a giant orange temple, we marveled that these beautiful things could have so much meaning, and that we could be so very ignorant of it all.

		If you go ... Koyasan is in a gorgeous mountain region of Japan's Wakayama Prefecture, approximately 5 1/2 hours from Tokyo by train, 1 1/2 hours from Osakaand 2 hours and 50 minutes from Kansai airport. (The final bit of the train trip to Koyasan involves a steep and lovely cable car ride up Mount Koya through the dense woods.) The Japan National Tourist Organization has information about getting to Koyasan at www.jnto.go.jp/eng/ RTG/ PTG/pdf/pg-508.pdf, and more information is available at any train station or tourist office. Free, English-speaking volunteer tour guides are available all over Japan, and they can generally be arranged 24 hours in advance from the JNTO offices throughout the country, including in Koyasan. For more information about the volunteer guides, visit www.jnto.go.jp/eng/ GJ/BTG/lvg.html. You can book a monastery room on your own (look for listings of monasteries that accept guests in guide books or on the Web, such as: japaneseguest houses.com/db/ mount_koya/index.htm) or through the JNTO, which will provide a list of such monasteries along with prices, and may even book the room for you. -- Arin Greenwood

Rather than going to Koyasan, I had wanted our group to visit a samurai theme park because in addition to requiring fewer hours on trains, it would give us what we were looking for: insight into Japan.

My brother, Lee, and I had been in Japan for almost a week, and our cousin, Alyson Davis, had been there for seven months. We had all decided that Japan was a spectacular place, but we didn't understand the language, and it was driving me a bit crazy. A samurai theme park, I argued, would be just the thing to pull us out of the funk we were beginning to experience, having seen so much and understood so little.

But Alyson was unmoved. She thought it would be peaceful and enlightening to stay in a monastery. She thought I'd think so, too, and when I said I wasn't convinced that I could handle very many more temples and shrines -- gorgeous, stunning places that left me absolutely sure that I was missing a very serious point -- she told me to think of Koyasan as an esoteric Buddhist theme park, where the people playing monks would happen to be actual monks.

When I still wasn't convinced, she hid the train schedule, but that's another story.

Koyasan has more than 100 monasteries, many of which offer meals and ryokan-style accommodation -- which means traditional Japanese rooms with futon mattresses on the floor, and communal bathrooms replete with hot soaking tubs called onsen. In our guidebook, several of the host monasteries were described in glowing terms for their food, landscaping or the friendliness of their resident monks. Haryo-in Temple, the monastery where we booked a room, was lauded as Koyasan's cheapest. (Lee was on a tight budget.)

Our monastery, like a lot of temples and ryokan we'd seen, had an open-air section in the middle, and in this open-air section was a magical-looking garden containing small trees, rocks and carp-filled ponds. Unlike the other places where we'd stayed, it also had a meditation room, opposite a stone table above which there was a sign (in English) that said: "Do Not Place Anything on This; It Is a Holy Spot." It also had strict bathing hours, which we knew by the signs posted in Japanese and English that said: "Bath Times Are Between 4:30 and 7 ONLY."

In the dining room were pillows on the floor for the monastery's guests -- me, Alyson, Lee, two old ladies in the cotton kimonos provided by the monastery and a young Japanese couple -- but the monks were eating elsewhere. Sampling the various beans, vegetables, soups, meat substitutes (monks observe strict vegetarian diets) and salads, I discovered that the food was uniformly delicious, especially the mandarin oranges.

After dinner, Lee and Alyson watched a baseball game -- the Hanshin Tigers versus a less famous team -- with the two elderly ladies, who fed them bags of processed meat-flavored snacks. I went to our room, which was up a flight of dingy concrete stairs. The room itself was small, with traditional tatami mats, a low tea table, a tea set, three kimonos folded in a box, and sliding glass doors overlooking some nice trees and rather unattractive buildings. I put the tea table up against a wall, unrolled a musty-smelling futon mattress from the closet and went to sleep. It was 8 p.m. Official "lights out" wasn't until 10 p.m., but I was exhausted.

And then, some time well past the witching hour and from the other side of our crowded room, Lee screamed. Alyson and I jumped. "What is it?" I asked Lee, who was shaking.

"Something crawled on my leg," he said. "It climbed over me."

"A monk?" asked Alyson.

"It was too small to be a monk," said Lee, whimpering a little.

"Was it a carp?" I asked. Lee looked to be on the verge of tears.

"You aren't funny," he said. "It's a rat. I know it's a rat. I saw a rat in the TV room before. And now rats are crawling on me."

He picked up a knotted kimono tie made of heavy fabric, and threw it at his mattress to see if anything would scurry. Nothing did. Alyson picked up another kimono tie and threw it at Lee. "You saw a rat, and you didn't tell me?" she said. Lee threw the tie back at the mattress. Still, nothing scurried. We hit the mattress one more time, concluded that all rodent activity in our room had come to a halt and went back to sleep, thinking not very nice things about inexpensive monasteries.

What is the sound of a gong being hit 30 times? Loud, loud, loud (times 10). "Too early," Alyson said, and went back to sleep. Not much later, another long series of gongs woke us up again.

It was 6:30, and we were, in fact, quite late for meditation. I took a sip from a cup of green tea that had been left out overnight. It was horrible. I went downstairs (alone) in my pajamas, curious to see whether morning meditation would be less of a disaster than the first time I tried yoga. In the meditation room, I found the Japanese couple perched on their knees with their feet tucked under their bums, the uncomfortable pose that is de rigueur when sitting on the floor. I sat near them (in a more comfortable, less appropriate position) and tried to see what was going on.

The room was lighted and separated from the room where the monks were meditating by a wall through which several doorways were cut. I could make out two monks at shiny brass-colored gongs that were being hit periodically and could hear a lot of other monks chanting melodically in low tones. After about half an hour, the chanting and gonging stopped, and the monks filed out of their room, through our room, and away down the hall.

One monk stood in front of the couple and myself. He turned to them and spoke in Japanese for several minutes, with lots of hand gestures. The couple made appreciative clucks, and they appeared to be entirely enthralled by what the monk said to them. He stopped, they got up and left, and then he turned to me. In English he said, "I had an aneurysm. I was not supposed to recover. But I meditate every day, and I can use my hands." Then he got up and left the room.

Lee, Alyson and I got dressed and ate breakfast in the eating room (it was a meal identical to dinner, except without the mandarin oranges). We packed and paid, then went to meet the English-speaking guide in front of Kongobuji, Koyasan's head temple. But it could have been any temple -- they are all the same, beautiful and incomprehensible. I didn't know why we were even bothering to go see another, except that it seemed like the thing to do.

Standing in the rain in front of Kongobuji was a pretty, frazzled-looking Japanese woman with hair in braids pinned to the top of her head. She was reading a pamphlet in English about Koyasan. When we approached her to ask whether she was Toshie, our guide, she said, "Shall we go inside?"

"OK, why not?" one of us said listlessly. Being this stupid had tired us out.

We walked through the gate on a stone path and into the temple, where we all took off our shoes and paid the monk collecting entry fees. (It usually costs around 500 yen -- around $4.70 -- to get inside a temple, and this was no exception.) After wandering past several rooms with painted walls and signs written only in Japanese, Toshie pointed at some painted screens in a room, and said, "These paintings were done in the 1400s by a very famous artist. They depict Kobo Daishi's journey from China, where he'd studied for several years."

We moved to the next room, where Toshie explained the next panels. "When Kobo Daishi returned to Japan, he wanted to set up a monastery for esoteric Buddhism. But he didn't know where to do it. So he threw a vajra. Do you know what that is? It's a three-pronged ancient instrument. You can see it depicted in this painting here." She pointed to a small painting that we would have overlooked, and if not overlooked, not understood. "He threw it, and said that wherever it landed is where he'd build his monastery.

Kongobuji is the temple Kobo Daishi built.

"In the next room, Toshie pointed to a painting of two dogs, one white and one black. "These are the dogs that guided Kobo Daishi to Koyasan. They were given to him by a hunter he met while looking for the place where the vajra landed. The hunter said they could help him find it, and they did."

Toshie took us into Kongobuji's kitchen and showed us the giant pots used to cook for 1,000 monks. She showed us a raised platform held off the floor by chains, above which was another platform covered in white paper.

"Do you know what that's for?" she asked. Of course we did not. "All the monasteries have rats, but the monks can't kill them because they're Buddhists. So they invented this -- the lower one is a food shelf, but the rats can't reach it because they slip off the paper on the higher one onto the floor." Or onto my brother, I thought, feeling very perky.

And so it went, Toshie providing for us explanation, context, insight, anecdotes -- it was astonishing. Temples are interesting! And we were beginning to act toward her like children to a beloved baby sitter. "Toshie! Toshie! Do you have a boyfriend? What are you studying, Toshie? Do you live in a house? Tell us more about esoteric Buddhism!"

Toshie told us that she taught English in a nearby private school, but was studying to be a tour guide. She was giving free tours, she said, to increase her confidence. When she was ready, she'd charge around 30,000 yen -- about $280 -- per day. We fawned and complimented, telling her that she was already worth twice that amount. It seemed to embarrass her, but it was true -- especially considering that she'd perfected her English while watching "Charmed" and "ER" on TV, and reading comic strips such as Garfield ("He's a funny cat. Don't you think?").

Toshie walked us through town -- stopping at a pastry shop to show us which rice cakes were the most delicious, passing a group of people in black and explaining that they were going to a funeral for a well-connected monk, showing us the store where the monks buy their ubiquitous loose cotton outfits -- and on to the Okunoin Cemetery.

The Okunoin Cemetery is in the woods and filled with hundreds of stone grave markers in various shapes. (Toshie explained the Shinto and Buddhist meanings of some of the more common shapes.) Many famous people are buried in the enormous cemetery, and some companies -- such as the coffee company UCC -- have corporate gravesites; UCC's corporate gravesite is marked with a big stone coffee cup, which to my knowledge doesn't symbolize anything other than delicious coffee.

Kobo Daishi's entombment is in the Okunoin Cemetery, too, Toshie told us, as we passed a group of monks carrying a large covered table. "Those monks," she said, "are coming back from taking Kobo Daishi his lunch. They do it every day." Even Toshie couldn't explain why a dead monk would need food twice a day (he doesn't like breakfast?) but it was hardly consequential.

While walking, Toshie explained that esoteric Buddhists believe that enlightenment can occur in this lifetime, while most Buddhist sects believe that in this lifetime, one can only work toward a better reincarnation. She said, though, that she knows only one monk who claims to have achieved enlightenment, and that this person doesn't seem to have changed as a result of becoming a Buddha (enlightened one). "He is still very nice," she said. "And wise."

We wandered through the graveyard in the rain, feeling very spiritual and wet. Toshie took us to a well next to a grave and said that if we could see our reflection in it, it meant that we'd have longevity. (We all did.)

She took us to another test, a wooden cage with a heavy stone inside it. "If you can pick up the stone with one hand, your wish will come true," Toshie said. Lee could, but it still didn't stop raining.

Arin Greenwood is a freelance writer and lawyer living on the Pacific island of Saipan.

E-mail this story   Print this story