Mount Miwa

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There is no building to look at. A visitor who comes to the foot of the mountain at Sakurai, in the southeastern corner of the Nara basin, passes under a gate and through a hall of worship and finds, where every other great shrine of Japan would set its locked inner sanctuary, nothing — only the open ground and, rising beyond it, a low green cone of cedar and cypress, 467 meters from the plain. That mountain is the object of the worship. Not a place a kami visits, not a screen behind which a kami is housed: the mountain itself is the body of the god. The cult at its base keeps no image and needs none, because there is nothing here to depict and nothing to enclose. What faces the worshipper through the gate is the kami, standing.

The mountain in the heartland

Mount Miwa — Miwa-yama (三輪山), called Mount Mimoro or Mimuro (三諸山) in the oldest layers of the record — sits on the eastern rim of the Yamato plain, the cradle ground of the early Japanese state. The land around it is dense with the founding monuments of that state. From roughly 250 to 350 CE, in the Shiki district at the mountain’s feet, the Yamato people raised six of the largest burial mounds in the islands, the keyhole-shaped kofun that give the period its name; the longest, the Hashihaka mound, runs some 280 meters. Archaeology places the center of early Yamato power here, around Miwa and the nearby Makimuku site, until power shifted away in the fourth century. The mountain was holy before that, and it has stayed holy since, which makes it among the very oldest continuously venerated sites in Japan — its rites judged, by the scholars who order such things, the most archaic stratum the tradition still performs.

The mountain’s sanctity is not a doctrine laid over it. It is the older thing, the thing the doctrines were built to explain. Long before the Yamato court commissioned the chronicles that fixed its myths in writing, the slope and the great cedars and the standing boulders on the wooded flanks were already the dwelling and the form of a power. When the imperial compilers came to set the story down, they recorded a mountain that was already ancient, and a worship that already had no need of a roof.

The written record begins, for almost everything in the kami world, with two books: the Kojiki (Records of Ancient Matters, 712) and the Nihon Shoki (Chronicles of Japan, 720), the mytho-histories the early imperial house commissioned to anchor its own descent. Both were composed to legitimize the Yamato line, and the genealogies and reign-dates they assign to the legendary first emperors are charter, not chronicle — claims made by a dynasty about itself, to be read as such. But both books also preserve, embedded in that charter, mountain-stories far older than the eighth-century court, and Miwa stands at the heart of them.

The haiden (hall of worship) at Ōmiwa Shrine, Sakurai. There is no honden behind it; worship is directed past the hall toward Mount Miwa. Photo by Yanajin33, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The kami who is the mountain

The kami of Miwa is Ōmononushi (大物主), “Great Master of Things” — a being of serpent and of storm, a power over rain and over plague. The chronicles are careful, and revealingly uncertain, about who exactly he is. The Nihon Shoki at one point declines to name the principal deity outright; elsewhere it makes Ōmononushi a name, or an aspect, of Ōnamuchi — that is, of Ōkuninushi, the great land-shaping kami of Izumo. The thread that ties Miwa to Izumo is told in the land-ceding, the kuni-yuzuri: when Ōkuninushi surrenders the visible country to the heavenly line, a part of his own spirit — his saki-mitama and kushi-mitama, his auspicious and wondrous souls — asks to be enshrined on Mount Mimoro in Yamato, to stand guard there. So the kami of Miwa is the soul of the land-master himself, lodged on a hill in the new heartland. The mountain that the Izumo god’s spirit chose is the mountain that became the body of the god.

His serpent nature runs through every myth attached to the slope. In one tale a maiden, Ikutamayori-hime, is visited each night by a beautiful stranger and grows pregnant without knowing who he is; her parents tell her to thread a hemp cord through the hem of his robe. In the morning the thread runs out through the keyhole, and they follow it — straight up to Mount Miwa, where the lover was the kami all along. (The name Miwa, “three rings,” is folk-traced to the three coils of thread left on the floor.) In another, grimmer story, the kami takes the princess Yamato-totohi-momoso-hime to wife but will come only by night and never let himself be seen. When she begs to look on him by day, he tells her he will hide in her comb-case, but she must not cry out. At dawn she opens it and finds a small snake; she screams; the god, shamed, flees back to the mountain in his serpent form. In remorse she takes her own life with a chopstick, and the great mound the Yamato raised over her is called Hashihaka, the Chopstick Tomb — the keyhole kofun that still stands in the mountain’s shadow.

The most consequential of the Miwa myths is the plague-story. In the reign assigned to the early emperor Sujin, a pestilence is said to have struck down half the people of the land. In dream and oracle Ōmononushi declares himself the cause, and names the price of relief: that his own rites be conducted by one Ōtataneko, a man descended from the kami himself. The emperor finds him, installs him as priest, and the plague lifts. The story is a charter for the Miwa priesthood — the Ōmiwa and Kamo families trace their descent from it — and it fixes Ōmononushi’s double face: the kami of the cure is the kami of the affliction, the power that sends the sickness and the power that lifts it the same power. Beside Ōmononushi the mountain holds two companion kami, Ōnamuchi and Sukunabikona, the great and the small land-makers of the old Izumo cycle, kami of healing and of medicine.

The serpent-and-thunder figure who lodges on Miwa belongs, then, to the storm-and-earth side of the kami world rather than to the solar, imperial line that the chronicles set above it. He is bound by descent and by aspect to Ōkuninushi, and through him to Susanoo, the storm-kami from whom the Izumo cycle springs — the powers of the visible land that the heavenly line received in the land-ceding. That the soul of the conquered land-master should ask to be enshrined, of all places, in the new royal heartland is the myth’s quiet hinge: the kingdom that took the country agreed to keep the old god of it standing at its eastern gate, where the rain came from and where the kings were buried. Miwa is the seam where the Izumo strand of the tradition is sewn into the Yamato one.

The shrine that houses nothing

The cult at the mountain’s foot is Ōmiwa-jinja (大神神社), reckoned one of the oldest shrines in the country, with origins in the Kofun age. Its distinction is an absence. Almost every Japanese shrine is built around a honden, the inner hall that houses the shintai — the “kami-body,” the object (a mirror, a sword, a stone) in which the kami is made present. Ōmiwa has no honden. It cannot have one, because its shintai is the whole mountain. The rites are performed in the haiden, the hall of worship, a seventeenth-century structure roofed in cypress bark; and the worshipper, standing before it, looks past it and up the slope, directing the prayer at the mountain itself. The kami is not in a box behind a curtain. The kami is the hill the prayer is aimed at.

This is what makes Miwa, in the eyes of those who study the tradition, the model of the most primordial form of kami-worship: the shintai-zan, the mountain-as-divine-body, worship that needs neither a temple nor an image because the god is the natural thing, present and unhoused. It is the form that the long history of Japanese religion is read as having begun from, before the continental fashion of halls and statues came in with Buddhism and gave the kami, too, their roofed sanctuaries. At Miwa the older way is not reconstructed; it was simply never abandoned.

A torii at Ōmiwa Shrine, Sakurai. The shrine’s gates open toward the mountain, which is itself the deity. Photo by Tamago Moffle, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The shrine’s gate is itself a sign of its antiquity. The torii at Ōmiwa is of an old and unusual form, the miwa torii or mitsu-torii, a triple gate — a central gateway flanked by two smaller ones — fitted, unlike most torii, with actual doors. The shrine treats the mountain behind it the way other shrines treat the locked sanctuary: as a threshold not lightly crossed. The presence of the kami is felt above all at the iwakura, the great standing boulders scattered up the wooded slope, and at the himorogi, the demarcated sacred spaces where, in the oldest practice, a kami was called down to a tree or a stone rather than into a building. These rocks and trees are not symbols of the kami; within the frame they are the kami’s points of standing, places where the body of the god rises through the surface of the ground.

The shrine’s calendar turns on the mountain’s double character — power over sickness, power over the harvest. The Saigusa Matsuri, the Lily Festival, is among its oldest rites, traced to the eighth century: shrine maidens dance with sprays of the wild lily that grows on the slope, and white and black sake are offered at the subsidiary Sai shrine, where the kami enshrined are Ōmononushi’s own family — his consort Tamakushi-hime and their daughter Isuzu-hime. The Hana-shizume, the blossom-appeasement, is older still in spirit: the kami of pestilence is quieted by the scattering of blossoms on the wind, so that the sickness does not ride the falling petals into the Yamato plain. Both rites speak to the side of Ōmononushi the Sujin myth made central — the god who sends the plague and the god who lifts it, the same god. In autumn the brewers come for the sake-making prayers. Through the year the mountain is read for what it is in the chronicles, a power that gives and withholds health and rain, and the rites are how the people of the plain keep their account with it. None of this requires an image. The thing addressed is in plain sight, filling the eastern sky from the shrine grounds.

The rule of the mountain

Because the mountain is the god’s body, to climb it is to walk on the kami. It is permitted — Miwa is one of the few sacred mountains of this kind a layperson may ascend — but only under restriction, by same-day arrangement at the office of the Sai shrine on the grounds, and under an old discipline. The climber crosses through a gate at the trailhead and onto holy ground; on the slope nothing may be eaten or drunk beyond water, and, by the custom that has marked the mountain as a thing apart, nothing may be carried back down — not a leaf, not a stone, not a fallen branch. What belongs to the mountain stays on the mountain, because it belongs to the god. The ascent is made in quiet, as a rite and not an outing, and the photographing of the slope is forbidden. The mountain is not scenery to be brought home. It is the body of a being, walked over barefoot in spirit if not always in fact, and left exactly as found.

The most visible of the mountain’s gifts is sake. The shrine is the tutelary cult of Japan’s rice-wine brewers, and the bond is old: the chronicles record that in Sujin’s reign a man named Ikuhi was appointed to brew the sacred sake offered to Ōmononushi, and that the kami of brewing is enshrined among the shrine’s subsidiary halls. The mountain’s cedars carry this patronage outward. A sugidama — a great ball of cedar twigs, sometimes called sakabayashi — is hung at the eaves of breweries and sake shops across the country to announce that a new vintage has been pressed; the custom takes its sense from the sacred cedars of Miwa, the ball understood to hold something of the mountain’s spirit. The shrine keeps its own enormous specimen, some 1.7 meters across and around 250 kilograms, hanging in the hall of worship. Brewers come to Miwa each autumn to pray for the year’s brew, and the new cedar ball goes up green and fades to brown as the wine matures — a clock made of the mountain, hung in the doorways of the trade.

The afterlife of the unhoused god

Miwa’s standing in the long history of the tradition rests on what it lacks. As halls and images spread through the kami cults — under the thousand-year fusion of kami and buddhas, the shinbutsu-shūgō in which the native gods were understood as local traces of the buddhas and bodhisattvas, and which built temple-shrines and gave the kami statues and sutras — Miwa kept its empty form. It developed its own medieval esoteric current, Miwa-ryū Shintō, a synthesis with the esoteric Buddhism of the mountain schools; but the heart of the cult, the imageless mountain, was never displaced. When the Meiji state in 1868 forced the separation of kami and buddhas — shinbutsu bunri, and the anti-Buddhist destruction that followed it — and set about defining a “pure” national Shinto, Miwa needed little purifying. It had always been, in the terms the modern state prized, the most original kami-place: a god with no idol, worshipped on its own ground.

That is why the mountain has come to function as a kind of standard. When scholars want to point to what kami-worship was before the continent reshaped it — to the diffuse, place-bound reverence for the powers in the land that long predates the bounded thing later called Shinto — they point to Miwa: the mountain that is a god, the shrine with nothing inside, the rite directed at a slope. Whether such worship was ever a single self-conscious “religion” in those early centuries is a matter scholars contest; the bounded concept of Shinto is largely a later construction. But the worship itself, the act of facing a mountain as a living power, is not contested at Miwa. It is performed there now, daily, exactly as the gate and the empty hall imply.

Ise carries the sun and the imperial mirror; Izumo carries the gathering of the gods and the tallest of the old halls; Kumano carries the pilgrim-roads and the syncretic mountains of the ascetics. Miwa carries something prior to all of them — the bare fact of the sacred mountain, worshipped whole, before anyone thought to build. The cedars on its flank are not old monuments to a vanished faith. They are the faith, still standing, and the worshippers who come to the foot of the slope and bow toward the trees are doing the oldest thing the tradition knows how to do.

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