Mount Hiei

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A single oil lamp burns in the inner sanctuary of the Konpon Chudo, the great hall on the eastern slope, and the monks who tend it will tell a visitor that its flame has never gone out. It was kindled, the tradition holds, by Saichō himself when he raised his first hermitage on this peak in 788, and it has been fed with oil every day since — the fumetsu no hōtō, the inextinguishable Dharma lamp, set to burn until the coming of the future buddha Maitreya. The claim is a large one, and the mountain has earned the right to make it. Few places in the Buddhist world have been the source of so much and the target of so much: Mount Hiei was the seedbed from which nearly every later school of Japanese Buddhism sprang, and it was burned to the ground, its community slaughtered, by a warlord who found its power intolerable.

Hiei rises to 848 meters on the border between Shiga and Kyoto Prefectures, northeast of the old imperial city and looking down on the western shore of Lake Biwa. The monastery that crowns it, Enryaku-ji, is not a single temple but a scattered city of halls strung across three precincts — Tōdō, the eastern pagoda, where Saichō began; Saitō, the western pagoda; and Yokawa, the northernmost, “along the river.” At its height before the late sixteenth century the complex is said to have held some three thousand buildings. To climb it is to walk among cryptomeria and moss and the foundation stones of vanished halls, a landscape that has been holy ground for more than twelve hundred years.

The hermit on the demon gate

The mountain’s sanctity is older than its monastery. Hiei had long been a seat of the local kami and a haunt of mountain ascetics before any temple stood on it, one of the forested peaks the early Japanese treated as a threshold between the human world and the sacred. Its transformation into the headquarters of a Buddhist school was the work of one man and one accident of geography. Saichō, a provincial monk dissatisfied with the licensed scholasticism of the Nara establishment, withdrew here in 788, built a grass hut, and vowed not to descend until he had grasped the Buddha’s mind. For a decade the retreat was obscure. Then, in 794, the court abandoned Nara and moved the capital to Heian-kyō — the city that would become Kyoto — and the new capital lay directly at Hiei’s foot.

In the continental geomancy the city’s planners followed, the northeast was the kimon, the “demon gate,” the unlucky quarter through which malign influence entered and which any capital was bound to guard. Mount Hiei stood precisely on that guarding quarter. What had been a hermit’s exile became, by the relocation of a city, a spiritual rampart over the throne, and Emperor Kanmu took the earnest monk into his patronage. That patronage carried Saichō across the sea to Tang China in 804, where he gathered the four strands he would weave into his school: the Tiantai teaching built on the Lotus Sutra, the meditative discipline of calming-and-contemplation, the Bodhisattva precepts, and a measure of esoteric ritual. On his return he won imperial recognition for his new Tendai school in 805 and 806 — the court formally allotting it yearly ordinands — and the mountain hut became the nucleus of an order.

The Konpon Chūdō, central hall of Enryaku-ji, which shelters the inextinguishable lamp; the present structure dates to 1642. — 663highland, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Saichō’s last and hardest battle was fought over ordination. The Nara schools held a monopoly on the platform where monks took their vows, binding every cleric in Japan to their authority. Saichō petitioned the court for the right to ordain his own monks on Hiei under the Mahāyāna Bodhisattva precepts alone, independent of Nara — a request the establishment fought bitterly. He died in 822 without seeing it granted; the permission came days after his death, and the independent Mahāyāna ordination platform was consecrated on the mountain in 827. With it, Hiei became a self-sufficient world, able to make its own monks, answer to its own abbots, and grow without limit.

The mother of the schools

Grow it did. Saichō had carried home from China a teaching strong in the Lotus and in meditation but comparatively thin in the esoteric rites that his great contemporary Kūkai, founder of the rival Shingon school, had mastered. Hiei made good the lack itself. Under Saichō’s successors — Ennin, who spent nearly a decade in Tang China and brought back the esoteric rites and the continuous nenbutsu chant, and Enchin after him — Enryaku-ji absorbed the full apparatus of Tantric esoteric Buddhism, the contemplative inheritance of Tiantai, and the Pure Land devotions, building its own esoteric stream, the taimitsu, beside Shingon’s, until it held within one institution most of what Japanese Buddhism could be. This breadth is the key to the mountain’s strange fertility. A monk trained on Hiei met, in one place, the whole spectrum of the teaching, and could find in it whatever answered his own need — and then, often, leave to make that answer into a school of its own.

The roster is extraordinary. Hōnen, who distilled from the Pure Land strand the single practice of calling on Amitābha and founded the Jōdo-shū, was a Hiei monk. So was his disciple Shinran, who carried that radical trust further into the Shin teaching of salvation by Other-Power alone. Eisai, who brought Rinzai Zen and tea-seed from China, trained on Hiei; so did Dōgen, the founder of Sōtō Zen, who began here before his journey to the continent. So did Nichiren, who would make the title of the Lotus Sutra the whole of his practice and turn fiercely against the mountain that bore him. Each of the great innovators of the Kamakura period — Pure Land, Zen, and Nichiren alike — descended from Hiei before breaking from it. The Tendai tradition’s claim to be “the mother of Kamakura Buddhism” is, on this point, simple historical description.

What made the mountain so generative was less a single doctrine than a climate of thought. Medieval Tendai was steeped in the teaching of hongaku, “original enlightenment” — the conviction that awakening is not a distant goal but the actual present status of all things. In its most radical Hiei form the claim ran that not only sentient beings but, as the scholar Jacqueline Stone has rendered the medieval texts, “even ants and crickets, mountains and rivers, grasses and trees, are all innately Buddhas,” and that ordinary life seen truly is the conduct of the eternally awakened one. The doctrine was the shared intellectual air of the age. Some of the new founders extended it; some recoiled from its too-easy affirmation and reasserted the gap between deluded beings and a saving buddha; either way they thought against its background. The mountain gave them both the problem and the materials for the answer.

The exact nature of that debt is itself contested among scholars. Some treat Hiei’s hongaku climate as the womb of the new schools, the common ground from which all of them rose; others argue the Kamakura founders made a clean break, overthrowing an abstract theory they judged to have bred laxity; still others see a dialectical emergence, the new teachings growing out of the old by reaction. What no one disputes is the bare genealogy. Before he was the founder of anything, each of these men was a monk of the mountain, schooled in its halls, fed on its nenbutsu and its shikan meditation and its endless doctrinal debate. The mountain was a single institution broad enough to contain Pure Land devotion, Zen sitting, esoteric ritual, and Lotus exegesis all at once — and broad enough, therefore, that men of genius kept finding within it the seed of a teaching it could not hold. Hiei did not so much produce its rivals as fail to contain them.

The walking buddhas and the warriors

Two practices of the mountain show, between them, the range of what Hiei contained — one turned inward toward an almost unimaginable austerity, the other outward toward armed power.

The first is the kaihōgyō, the practice of “circling the mountain,” traced to the ninth-century ascetic Sōō (831–918). In its full form it is a thousand-day ordeal spread across seven years, and the monk who undertakes it has been called, in English, a marathon monk. He walks a fixed circuit of the peak before dawn, stopping to pray at hundreds of halls, shrines, stones, and springs along the route, the daily distance lengthening as the years pass until in the sixth year he covers some sixty kilometers a day and in the seventh, for a hundred days, near eighty-four. He goes in white robes — the color of death in Japan — and carries, by an old discipline, a cord and a short blade, the tokens of a vow to end his own life rather than abandon the course. Near the seven-hundredth day comes the dōiri, nine days seated in the hall without food, water, or sleep, reciting the mantra of the wrathful guardian Fudō while attendants keep him from slipping under. To survive it is, in the mountain’s understanding, to die and return. Fewer than fifty men have completed the full thousand days since the 1880s; the rope is not a metaphor.

A sōhei, or warrior-monk, in clerical robes over armor — the kind of fighting cleric Hiei sent down from the mountain. — K. Ogawa, “Military Costumes in Old Japan,” 1895, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The second practice was the sōhei, the warrior-monks. As Enryaku-ji grew rich in lands and immune, by privilege, from secular law, it raised armies. By the late Heian period the mountain could put thousands of armed clergy into the field, and it used them. Hiei’s monks descended on the capital to press their demands, sometimes carrying the sacred palanquin of the affiliated Hie shrine as a weapon no layman dared strike; they warred with rival monasteries, above all with Onjō-ji (Miidera) at the mountain’s foot after a bitter schism split the Tendai order into the Sanmon faction of the mountain and the Jimon faction below. The retired emperor Shirakawa, who held more power than most sovereigns of his age, named three things beyond his control: the floodwaters of the Kamo River, the fall of the dice, and the monks of the mountain. For centuries Enryaku-ji was not only a school of the Dharma but a military and political power that the throne itself learned to fear.

Fire, lamp, and afterlife

That power met its end on the last day of the ninth month of 1571. The warlord Oda Nobunaga, then forcing the warring provinces toward unification, had found the mountain in arms against him — its monks sheltering and supplying the Azai and Asakura clans he was fighting. He had warned the mountain to stand aside; it refused. On the thirtieth of September his troops ringed the slopes and set them ablaze, sweeping upward and putting the precincts to the torch. The halls burned. Monks, scholars, lay residents, women, and children were cut down without distinction. The chronicles speak of thousands of buildings destroyed and many thousands killed; the figures, like most numbers in the sengoku chronicles, are likely inflated, but the scale of the catastrophe is not in doubt. Of the whole vast complex, almost nothing standing survived — by tradition a single minor hall, the Ruri-dō in the western precinct, was spared. The lamp that had burned since Saichō went out.

It did not stay out. When the mountain was rebuilt, the flame was carried back from Risshaku-ji at Yamadera in the far north, a Tendai temple to which Hiei’s fire had been divided centuries before — so that, in the tradition’s reckoning, the same lamp burns now as burned in 788, lit again from a flame that was itself once its own. There is a phrase the mountain keeps for the discipline of feeding it: abura danjō, to let the oil run dry is to let the heart run dry. The lamp is not a relic to be guarded behind glass but a labor to be performed every day, and the unbroken flame is finally a record of an unbroken attention, twelve hundred years of hands. The reconstruction of the halls around it was the work of decades. Toyotomi Hideyoshi and then the Tokugawa shoguns restored the mountain to favor, above all through the monk Tenkai, the long-lived Tendai prelate who served as religious counselor to the first Tokugawa rulers and made Hiei’s revival part of the new order’s sacred architecture. The present Konpon Chudo, the central hall sheltering the relit lamp, was raised in 1642 on the order of the shogun Tokugawa Iemitsu, and stands today a National Treasure of Japan.

The eastern slope of Mount Hiei looking down to Lake Biwa, the view from Enryaku-ji’s Shiga side. — Zairon, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

The rebuilt mountain never recovered the armies or the terror, and that was the point of the burning. What it kept was the Dharma and the lineage. The kaihōgyō is still walked; the white-robed runners of the mountain still circle the peak before dawn. The lamp still burns in the Konpon Chudo, tended by hand. In 1994 Enryaku-ji was inscribed, with sixteen other temples, shrines, and a castle, on the UNESCO World Heritage List as one of the Historic Monuments of Ancient Kyoto — recognition of a place whose history is the history of Japanese Buddhism in miniature, its founders and its schools, its asceticism and its violence, all rising from one forested peak on the demon gate of the old capital. The mountain that guarded the city against the spirits coming in from the northeast outlasted the city’s emperors, its own armies, and the warlord who tried to erase it; the flame on its altar is the oldest thing still alive on the peak, and the monks feed it oil at dawn as they have for twelve hundred years.

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