Kumano Sanzan

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The Kii Peninsula falls away from the old heartland of Japan into a country of folded ridges and gorges, cedar and cypress crowding the slopes down to a southern sea. Roads went in late and unwillingly. To travel here on foot, as nearly everyone did, was to leave the world of the living settlements behind for a region that the medieval imagination took to be the threshold of another order entirely — the dwelling of the dead, the Pure Land brought close, a paradise hidden in the mountains. At the heart of that country stand three great shrines, set far apart among the peaks and the water, and bound over the centuries into a single sacred complex: the three mountains of Kumano, the Kumano Sanzan.

The three shrines and the making of one sacred land

The complex is named for its three grand shrines, each an ancient seat of the kami of its own place. Kumano Hongū Taisha sits inland, in the upper Kumano valley near present-day Tanabe; its older site, Ōyunohara, lay on a great sandbar at the meeting of the Kumano and Otonashi rivers. Kumano Hayatama Taisha stands downstream at Shingū, where the Kumano River reaches the sea — its name, hayatama, “swift jewel,” carries the sense of the river’s last quickening before the ocean. Kumano Nachi Taisha rises in the mountains above the coast at Nachikatsuura, set beside the waterfall that is the most famous thing in all of Kumano. Three seats — one by a river, one by the sea, one beneath a falling column of water — none of them, at first, a part of the others.

Their joining was the slow work of centuries. The shrine tradition tells of the kami of the three places descending together onto a single boulder above Shingū — the Gotobiki-iwa, a colossal egg-shaped rock on the slope of Mount Kamikura, where Kamikura Shrine still keeps the spot — so that the three are remembered as having a common point of arrival in this world. By the early Heian period the cults had drawn close enough that the deity of Hongū could be addressed as Ketsumimiko-no-Ōkami, identified in the shrine chronicles with the storm-kami Susanoo; the deity of Hayatama as Hayatama-no-Ō; the deity of Nachi as Musubi (Fusumi), the kami of binding and generation. Each shrine then came to enshrine all three principal kami together — the Kumano Sansho Gongen, the “three Kumano avatars” — so that a pilgrim who reached any one shrine had, in a sense, reached all three. What had been three local cults became one religion of Kumano, and the rugged land that held them became, in devotional language, a single paradise on earth.

That language was not loose metaphor. Hongū was read as the Pure Land of Amida, the buddha of the western paradise; Nachi as the Fudaraku (Potalaka) of Kannon, the bodhisattva of compassion; the whole peninsula as a country where the boundary between this life and the next had worn thin. From the coast near Nachi a small number of devotees undertook the practice of fudaraku tokai — setting out by sealed boat toward the southern horizon in search of Kannon’s paradise across the water, a one-way voyage from which they did not return. The land itself was understood as the far edge of the living world, and the journey into it as a passage that was already half a journey out of it.

The vermilion three-storied pagoda of Seiganto-ji, the Buddhist temple beside Kumano Nachi Taisha, framed against the white plunge of Nachi Falls. Photo: Zairon, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0.

The falling water that is itself the kami

What sets Nachi apart, even within Kumano, is the waterfall. Nachi-no-Taki drops in a single uninterrupted plunge of 133 meters — the tallest single-drop waterfall in Japan — perhaps thirteen meters wide at its lip, a sheer white column falling out of the forested mountain into a deep basin. And the falls are not the seat of a kami, the way a shrine building or a sacred tree might house a descending deity. The water is the kami. It is venerated as Hiryū Gongen, the “flying-dragon avatar,” and the cataract itself is the divine presence, worshipped directly. There is no main hall placed between the worshipper and the god; the object of devotion is the moving water.

This is the older logic of the kami world rendered in its purest form. Across the islands the divine is found resident in striking features of the land — a mountain, a stone, an ancient tree, a great rock at sea — and at Mount Miwa, near the old capital, the mountain itself is the body of the kami, with no inner sanctuary because the kami needs none. Nachi belongs to the same family of sites, but the chosen feature is water in motion, the most living and least possessable of forms. Each morning a priest of the falls’ shrine, Hiro-jinja, still makes offering to the cataract. The devotion is undiminished by the falls’ fame; the column of water is approached as a god because, within this frame, that is what it is.

Beside the waterfall, and inseparable from its worship, stands the Buddhist temple Seiganto-ji, the first of the thirty-three Kannon pilgrimage sites of western Japan, its three-storied vermilion pagoda set so that the pilgrim sees pagoda and waterfall in one view. Shrine and temple, kami and buddha, share the same sacred ground at the foot of the falls — which is the second thing that made Kumano what it was.

Where kami and buddha were one

For roughly a thousand years, across Japan, the kami and the buddhas were not rivals or even neighbors so much as two faces of a single field of the sacred. The doctrine that held them together was honji-suijaku — “original ground and manifest trace” — by which the local kami were understood as the suijaku, the traces or local manifestations, of buddhas and bodhisattvas, the honji or original ground. The same power, seen from two sides: a buddha in its cosmic aspect, a kami in its local one. A kami known to be the trace of a buddha was honored with the title gongen, “provisional manifestation” — a buddha appearing in the form of a kami. Nowhere was this synthesis worked out more thoroughly than at Kumano.

The three Kumano kami were each assigned a buddha as their original ground. Hongū’s Ketsumimiko was the trace of Amida Nyorai (Amitābha), buddha of the western Pure Land. Hayatama at Shingū was the trace of Yakushi Nyorai, the buddha of healing. Nachi was the trace of Senju Kannon, the thousand-armed Avalokiteśvara of boundless compassion. To stand before the Kumano kami was therefore to stand before the buddhas; to complete the pilgrimage was held to secure rebirth in Kannon’s paradise. Pilgrims did not move between two religions when they passed from shrine to temple at Kumano. They worshipped a single sacred reality that wore both faces at once — the fullest meeting-ground, in all the islands, of the kami and the buddhas.

The combinatory system reached deep into ritual and even into the menagerie of lesser deities. The Kumano cult absorbed continental and esoteric figures; it developed its own protective avatars and its own corps of female shrine-mediums, the Kumano bikuni, nuns who traveled the country with painted scrolls — the Kumano kanjin jikkai mandara — preaching the merit of the pilgrimage and depicting the ten realms of existence to ordinary audiences. The teaching that Kumano carried out into Japan was not a creed of words but a guarantee in pictures: come to these mountains, worship kami and buddha as one, and the road through death is opened.

The Kumano fusion went further than the simple pairing of three kami with three buddhas. Each of the three shrines, having absorbed all three principal kami, also carried the full set of buddha-grounds, so that the worship at any one of them folded the others into itself; a dozen further avatars, the jūnisho gongen, the “twelve manifestations,” were ranged around the central three, each with its own buddha-original. The effect was a single layered icon of the sacred in which a worshipper could not finally separate kami from buddha, shrine from temple, this world from the Pure Land. It is this density — the sheer thoroughness with which the two religions were braided at Kumano — that made the three mountains the standing example, in the medieval mind, of what the kami-and-buddha world could be.

“The Great Nachi Waterfall in Storm,” by Suzuki Fuyō, 1798 (Seikadō Bunko Art Museum). The falls themselves are the deity Hiryū Gongen. Public domain (PD-Art).

The mountains as a discipline

The third thing Kumano became was a training-ground. The high pilgrim-paths that link Yoshino in the north to Kumano in the south run roughly a hundred kilometers along the spine of the Ōmine range, and to walk them was — for the mountain-ascetics who made them their discipline — not travel but practice. These were the yamabushi, the practitioners of Shugendō, the mountain religion that fused esoteric Buddhism, kami-worship, and the older cult of the peaks. To them the Ōmine traverse, the Okugake, was read as a walk through a living mandala — the southern half toward Kumano identified with the Womb-World mandala, the northern half with the Diamond-World — so that crossing the range was an embodied passage through the whole structure of the cosmos, undertaken to ripen the body itself toward buddhahood.

Kumano stood at the southern pole of this sacred geography, and its institutional weight in the tradition was enormous. When the cloistered emperors of the late Heian court made Kumano the object of their devotion, they appointed a Kumano-sanzan-kengyō, an administrator of the three shrines; the monk Zōyo, who guided the retired Emperor Shirakawa’s pilgrimages, held that office and founded Shōgo-in in Kyoto, the temple that became the head of one of the two great Shugendō lineages — with the Kumano cult at its devotional center. The mountains that the yamabushi walked in austerity and the mountains that the emperors visited in state were the same mountains, and Kumano held both at once.

Yamabushi on the Ōmine Okugakemichi, the high traverse linking Yoshino to Kumano. Photo: WolfgangMichel, Wikimedia Commons, CC0.

The procession likened to a line of ants

The reception of Kumano in medieval Japan was a flood of pilgrims unlike anything the islands had seen. Imperial devotion came first. The earliest imperial visit is placed in 908, under the retired Emperor Uda; the practice became regular after the cloistered Emperor Shirakawa’s pilgrimage of 1090, and over the following century the retired sovereigns made the long journey from the capital again and again. Shirakawa went nine times. The cloistered Emperor Go-Shirakawa went some thirty-three or thirty-four times — an extraordinary record of a court that organized whole expeditions around the road to Kumano, building the network of waystation shrines, the ōji, the “ninety-nine princes,” that marked and sanctified the route south.

Behind the emperors came everyone else. By the later medieval centuries the pilgrimage had spread from the aristocracy to warriors and then to commoners of every rank, men and women alike, until the road carried a crowd so dense and so continuous that it earned its lasting name: the ari no Kumano-mōde, the “ants’ pilgrimage to Kumano” — the line of travelers along the mountain paths likened to a column of ants, unbroken, each following the one ahead. The image is admiring as much as it is wry. It records a devotion so general that the wild and remote peninsula, the supposed edge of the living world, was for centuries one of the most thronged places in Japan.

Purification water at Kumano Hongū Taisha, the inland shrine of the three. Photo: Douglas Perkins, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0.

The roads themselves became part of what survived. The Kumano Kodō is not a single path but a system of routes converging on the three shrines: the Nakahechi from Tanabe across the mountains, the most traveled of the imperial roads; the coastal Ōhechi; the Kohechi down from the Buddhist headquarters of Kōyasan; the Iseji linking Kumano to the great shrines of Ise; and the Ōmine Okugake of the yamabushi. Worn into the forest floor, paved in places with old stone, lined with the moss-grown ōji, these were among the few pilgrimage routes anywhere preserved largely intact across the centuries.

The complex did not pass through the modern era unchanged. The Meiji government’s forced separation of kami from buddhas in 1868 — the shinbutsu bunri, which tore apart the thousand-year fusion that Kumano had embodied more fully than almost anywhere — fell hard on the three mountains, severing shrine from temple where the two had been one. Seiganto-ji, the temple beside the Nachi falls, was nearly dissolved and survived only because it was the great Kannon pilgrimage site; the worship of the buddhas at the shrines was suppressed. The natural world pressed in too: in 1889 a catastrophic flood swept away most of Hongū’s ancient site on the Ōyunohara sandbar, and the surviving halls were moved to higher ground in 1891. Today a steel torii 33.9 meters tall — the largest shrine gate in the world, raised in 2000 — marks the old riverine site where the original shrine stood.

In 2004 the whole sacred range was recognized as a treasure of the world’s heritage. On 7 July of that year UNESCO inscribed the “Sacred Sites and Pilgrimage Routes in the Kii Mountain Range” on the World Heritage List — the three Kumano grand shrines, the Yoshino-Ōmine Shugendō sites, the Shingon monastic center of Kōyasan, and the pilgrim-roads connecting them, including the Kumano Kodō. It was, and remains, one of only a small number of sites listed in part for its pilgrimage routes as living cultural landscapes rather than for monuments alone. The recognition honors what Kumano had been for more than a millennium: a wild country taken for the doorstep of the other world, where the falling water was a god, where kami and buddha were worshipped as a single power, and where the road south carried its unbroken line of pilgrims into the mountains.

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