Day 9
Mount Kōya, twelve hundred years of monastery
Morning
Danjō Garan and Konpon Daitō
Three hours of driving east then south, up to the plateau at 800 metres of altitude where the monk Kūkai, also called Kōbō Daishi, founded in 816 the seat of the Shingon Buddhist school. The original sacred precinct was laid out by Kūkai himself: the Konpon Daitō, a great vermilion pagoda forty-eight metres high, is not a reliquary but a three-dimensional mandala, whose statues and painted pillars reproduce the structure of the cosmos.
Kongōbu-ji
The head temple of Shingon, whose painted partitions tell the life of Kūkai and which holds the room in which Toyotomi Hidetsugu was forced to commit suicide in 1595. Its Banryūtei is the largest rock garden in Japan: a hundred and forty stones from Shikoku arranged as two dragons in a sea of gravel.
Afternoon
Okunoin
Two kilometres of avenue beneath centuries-old cryptomerias, lined with more than two hundred thousand funerary steles: warlords, monks, poets, and monuments erected by modern companies, all wanting to rest near Kūkai. At the end, the Tōrō-dō, the hall of lanterns, holds more than ten thousand of them, two of which are said to have burnt since the 11th century.
Reihōkan
The Kōya treasure museum, opened in 1921: more than a hundred thousand pieces including twenty-eight national treasures, statues, mandalas and scrolls, shown in rotation.
Evening
The Okunoin at night
After nightfall, the avenue is lit only by its stone lanterns. This is the moment you sleep on the mountain for. Guided tours in English led by a monk set off in the early evening; they are booked separately from the accommodation.
Good to know
Ekō-in: bookings open eleven months ahead on the official website and go fast. The morning service takes place at 7:00 AM in the main hall, followed by the goma fire ritual at 7:30 AM at the Bishamondō: both are free and need no registration for guests, but pyjamas and yukata are not admitted and flash photography is forbidden. The night visit to the Okunoin is run by another operator, is booked separately and is often full from March to November.
