The top of 226-meter-high Mount Shirataki on Innoshima Island in the Inland Sea between Hiroshima and Shikoku is covered with 700 Buddhist statues.
500 of them are of the rakan, or arhats, said to be disciples of the historical Buddha.
With its rocky outcroppings, Mount Shirataki is believed to have been a site favored by Yamabushi, the shugendo ascetics who practised their austerities in the mountains.
Later, the Murakami Clan established a Kannon Hall on the mountaintop and is used it as a lookout over the surrounding waters.
The rakan, however, along with most of the other statues, were put here in the early 19th century.
A man named Hashiwabara Denroku founded a new religion based on elements of Buddhism, Shinto, Confucianism, and Christianity.
Betwen 1827 and 1830 he and a discile together with stonemasons from Onomichi carved 500 rakan statues.
The vast majority were not complete statues, rather relief carvings.
They were also fairly crude and lacking the refinement of many rakan.
Therefore the idea that you will be able to recognize the face of someone you know within the 500 figures is a little harder to realize.
There are about 200 other statues on the mountaintop and I will cover them in the next post, and also a little more detail on the unusual cult and its founder.
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