The Yamabushi

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Twice a year the slopes above Yoshino fill with the long, hollow note of a conch. The men who blow it walk in single file along the spine of the range, in white over checked stoles, small black caps lashed to their foreheads, staves ringing as they climb. They are going up into the mountain the way a child goes into the womb — to be carried, dissolved, and born again at the descent. They are the yamabushi, and the path they walk is among the oldest continuous disciplines of the Japanese highlands.

The word reads, in its characters, as those who lie down in the mountains (山伏) — who prostrate themselves in the peaks, who submit to them, who make their bed among them. They are the practitioners of Shugendō, the way of cultivating spiritual power through ordeal in the sacred ranges, and their tradition is the densest single knot in which the kami of the islands and the buddhas brought from the continent were tied together. To follow the yamabushi is to walk the seam where the two worlds met.

The ascetic and his demons

Every lineage of the mountain path looks back to one figure: En no Gyōja, En the Ascetic, also called En no Ozunu and En no Ubasoku, En the Layman. Tradition gives his life as roughly 634 to 701, in the Asuka period, on and about Mount Katsuragi at the edge of the Yamato plain. He is the founder, the first to organize the discipline into a doctrine, the patriarch whose image stands at the head of the temples — an old man with a long beard, a staff, a peaked cap, flanked by two horned servants.

The documentary trace beneath the legend is single and stark. The Shoku Nihongi, the imperial chronicle completed in 797, records under the date corresponding to 26 June 699 that En no Kimi Ozunu was banished to the island of Izu, after a disciple accused him of misleading the people by sorcery; the chronicle adds that he had lived on Mount Katsuragi and was reputed to command the spirits of the mountains, binding them with his arts to fetch water and gather firewood when they would not obey. That is the whole of the contemporaneous record — an Asuka-period mountain ascetic, famous and feared enough to be exiled, and credited with power over the unseen.

The legend grew around that seed. The Nihon Ryōiki, the first Japanese collection of Buddhist marvel-tales, compiled by the monk Kyōkai in the decades around 800, gives the wonder-working En in full: he flies between the peaks, he climbs to heaven, he is exonerated as a being of the bodhisattva order, and he commands two demons, Zenki and Goki — the front-demon and the rear-demon, a married pair of oni who became his attendants and, in the tradition’s reckoning, the ancestors of the lineages who keep the inner trails. Medieval foundation-legends layered more: his opening of Mount Kinpu above the Yoshino river, his vision there of the wrathful blue deity carved from a cherry tree, his binding of the kami of Katsuragi for failing to help him build a bridge of stone across a gorge. In 1799, at a ceremony marking the eleven-hundredth year since his passing, the court conferred on him the posthumous title Jinben Daibosatsu, Great Bodhisattva of Divine Transformation.

Katsushika Hokusai, En no Gyōja with the demons Zenki and Goki, from the Hokusai Manga, vol. 10, c. 1819. Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

Two readings of this founder live side by side, and the distinction matters. That En no Ozunu the Asuka ascetic existed, the chronicle attests. That En no Gyōja was the founder of an organized, continuous mountain tradition reaching unbroken from the seventh century is reception — a claim the lineages make and the historians qualify. The institution that called itself a way crystallized later, in the Heian centuries, when practitioners of esoteric Buddhism and unaffiliated holy men converged on the same sacred ranges and organized the practice of mountain entry under aristocratic patronage. By the high medieval period the path had its two great streams: the Honzan line, which gathered around the Tendai-affiliated temple of Shōgo-in in Kyoto with the Kumano cult at its devotional heart, and the Tōzan line, which gathered around the Shingon temple of Daigo-ji and its sub-cloister of Sanbō-in, organized about the senior guides of the Ōmine range. A Tokugawa edict of 1613 made the division administrative: every yamabushi was required to enroll under one head or the other, while regional centers in the north and in Kyushu kept a measure of their own standing, and a great class of married, settled village ascetics served the laity with prayer, exorcism, and herbal cure.

The mountain as instrument

The claim at the center of the discipline is concrete, not figurative. Spiritual power — genriki, the verification or evidence that gives the way its name, the second character of Shugendō — is acquired through bodily austerity performed in the body of the mountain. The peak is not scenery for an inward journey. It is the apparatus. The practitioner enters it and is altered by what he enters.

The tradition reads the mountain through the lens of esoteric Buddhism, which it imports from the Shingon and Tendai schools and bends to its own end. The Shingon system maps the cosmos onto two great mandalas, the Diamond World and the Womb World; the mountain path takes the long Ōmine range and reads the range itself as that double mandala laid out on the earth, the southern half from Yoshino toward Kumano as the Womb World and the northern half as the Diamond World, so that to walk the spine of the peaks is to traverse the whole of the cosmos on foot. The doctrinal prize is the one the esoteric schools name — becoming buddha in this very body, attainment in the living flesh rather than across unnumbered lifetimes — but the mountain path seeks it through the worn sole and the burning thigh rather than through visualization alone. In this it stands beside the older Japanese reverence for the peaks as the dwelling of the gods, the cult of the sacred mountain onto which the imported cosmology was grafted.

Mountain entry — the central rite — is structured as gestation and rebirth. The ascetic enters the peak as if into a womb, undergoes a symbolic death in its inner recesses, and is reborn as he comes down. The traverse is read as a passage through the realms of existence: the hells, the hungry ghosts, the beasts, the warring spirits, the human and the heavenly, and beyond them the four states of the awakened, each enacted at its own station along the trail. The austerities that carry the practitioner through are spare and severe. There is takigyō, the standing under a waterfall — bare to the cold, reciting the Heart Sutra and the spell of the immovable deity while the column of water falls on the crown. There is fasting, the gut emptied to sharpen the spirit. There is the ordeal at the cliff-edge in the Ōmine peaks, where the novice is held head-down over the drop to weigh and renounce his faults. And there is the great open-air fire-rite, the saitō goma, the outdoor descendant of the Indian fire-offering carried east through the esoteric schools, in which prayers written on slips of wood are fed to a roaring pyre and the smoke carries them up.

A yamabushi on the Ōmine Okugakemichi traverse near Yoshino. Photograph by Wolfgang Michel, 2014. Wikimedia Commons, CC0 public-domain dedication.

Binding the kami and the buddhas is a doctrine the mountain path made its working engine: honji suijaku, the teaching that the local gods are the traces let down into the world by the buddhas and bodhisattvas who are their true ground. By it, each mountain kami was identified with a buddha or bodhisattva, and the peak became at once a shrine of the god and a Buddhist holy site, neither displacing the other. The blue deity of Kinpusen, the fierce immovable one carried across the whole tradition, the cosmic Buddha at the heart of the mandala, and the gods of each range — these were the figures the yamabushi served. Their habit was itself a piece of doctrine: the small black lacquered cap of twelve folds worn on the forehead, read as the twelve links that chain a being to the round of rebirth; the thick fringed stole worn across the white robe; the conch-shell trumpet that signals across the ridges and announces the entry into the peak; the staff with its ringing metal head; the pack-altar borne on the back. The man so dressed lived between the village and the wild, and trafficked with the powers of both — priest and healer and guide at once, the one who could go up into the dangerous high places and come down again carrying their force.

The most extreme austerity in the tradition’s history grew at the northern mountain of Yudono and is recorded, soberly, as a thing once done and now forbidden. There, between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, a handful of ascetics pursued sokushinbutsu, buddhahood in the very body taken to its furthest literal point: a years-long regimen of eating only nuts, bark, pine, and the resin of the lacquer tree, stripping the flesh of fat and fluid, ending in self-entombment and, after an interval, exhumation as a preserved and enshrined object of veneration. Twenty-one such figures survive in the temples of the north, with nine more known from the records. The waters of the Yudono spring carry arsenic, which researchers have proposed as part of why that lineage’s bodies endured. The court of the Meiji emperor outlawed the practice in 1879, and it remains prohibited under Japanese law; the surviving figures are tended as living presences, not as relics to be displayed. The discipline is set down here as documented history and not as anything to be attempted.

The ranges that taught the way

The mountain path had no single capital. It was a constellation of more than a hundred sacred ranges, each with its own gods, its own lineage-texts, its own ascetics, sharing a family likeness of doctrine and ordeal. Three complexes anchor it.

In the south, on the Kii peninsula, lies the classical heartland: the Kinpusen and Ōmine range running down from the cherry-clad slopes of Yoshino, and the three grand shrines of the Kumano Sanzan at the peninsula’s foot. The defining ritual journey of the whole tradition is the traverse of the spine between them, the Ōmine Okugake, roughly a hundred kilometers of ridge read as the unified double mandala and articulated by scores of ritual stations. The great hall of Kinpusen-ji holds three towering blue images of the range’s wrathful deity, in one of the largest wooden buildings in the country; the summit precinct of Sanjōgatake keeps to this day a taboo barring women from its inner ground, a restriction the modern tradition still observes there. In 2004 UNESCO inscribed these mountains, together with the Shingon headquarters at Kōyasan and the pilgrim-roads that link them all to the old capitals, as the Sacred Sites and Pilgrimage Routes in the Kii Mountain Range — a cultural landscape, the listing notes, that preserves an extraordinarily well-documented tradition of sacred mountains sustained over more than twelve centuries.

In the north, in the Yamagata highlands, rise the Three Mountains of Dewa: Haguro, the peak of the present world; Gassan, the peak of the past and the dead; and Yudono, the peak of the future and of rebirth — so that to climb the three in turn is itself to pass through death into new life. The tradition there traces its opening to a prince said to have arrived in 593, a chronology the northern mountains hold against the chronology of the southern founder. Haguro keeps a still-living cycle of seasonal peak-entries, the most important an initiatory training once stretching to seventy-five days and now compressed to a week. Near its foot stands a five-storied pagoda of weathered wood, a National Treasure, left standing on what are now shrine grounds — a survivor of the age when temple and shrine were one body on the mountain.

A yamabushi at Mount Haguro, one of the Three Mountains of Dewa. Photograph by Noah0812, 2020. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Beyond these two great centers stood many more. The high volcano of Ontake on the central spine drew, from the late eighteenth century, vast lay confraternities of plebeian pilgrims and oracle-seekers. Mount Fuji had its own pilgrim societies. The peaks of Hiko in the west, of Daisen and Tateyama and Hakusan in the center, each carried a tradition of mountain ascetics with its own cosmology. The austerities of Mount Hiei — the Tendai discipline of circling the peak over a thousand days — stand as a cousin to the yamabushi’s mountain entry, drawn from the same conviction that the road itself remakes the one who walks it.

The rupture and the return

For roughly a thousand years the kami and the buddhas were served together on the mountains, and the yamabushi were the most thoroughgoing of all those who served them so. They were woven deep into the religious life of the old villages — healers and exorcists, diviners and herbalists, leaders of pilgrimage, the men a household called for a sickness or a haunting, the figure who knew the trails into the high country and the words to say there. The integration was the whole of their power, and the integration was precisely what the modern state could not abide.

In 1868 the new government of the Meiji emperor began to force the kami and the buddhas apart. The separation edicts of that year, prosecuted as part of the construction of a state cult centered on the throne, set off a wave of anti-Buddhist destruction across the country — temples dismantled, images defaced, the combined shrine-temple complexes torn into their parts. For the mountain path, whose entire substance was the fusion now condemned, the blow was lethal. On 15 September 1872 the Great Council of State issued the abolition order: the Shugen sect, it declared, was from that day abolished, its branches to be folded into the Tendai and Shingon parent schools. Tradition holds that more than a hundred and seventy thousand yamabushi stood at the moment of the ban — a figure the sources repeat though none can independently verify; they were laicized, absorbed, or driven from religious life into farming. The head temple of the southern range was abolished outright, the Buddhist establishments of the northern mountains converted into shrines, the village ascetics scattered. Along the old stairways the stone guardian-figures still stand with their heads struck off, the mark of that iconoclasm left in the rock.

The discipline did not die, but it came very near it. What carried it through were the settled lineages and the lay societies, and the law that returned after 1945. The restoration of religious freedom let the mountain path reconstitute itself as independent bodies: the southern range organized as a sect of its own in 1948 with Kinpusen-ji at its head; the old Kyoto temple broke free in 1946 and was reconstituted under its own name in 1957; the Daigo-ji line resumed its mountain work within the Shingon fold; the northern Buddhist lineage revived its peak-entries alongside the shrine cult that had displaced it. Through the later twentieth century one regional tradition after another came back — by family descent-claim, by the rediscovery of a household’s ritual archive, by the patient relearning of routes that had gone half a century unwalked. Today the pilgrim-paths are walked again, the fire-rites burn, and the conch sounds twice a year above Yoshino. Where the older Japanese world built its sacred order out of the marriage of the local gods and the imported buddhas — the same marriage that produced the war-god Hachiman in his bodhisattva form and the Buddhist clergy of Mount Hiei — the yamabushi were its most uncompromising expression, the ones who took the fusion up onto the bare ridge and made a body of it. That body, broken once by the state, walks the high trails still.

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