Daisen-ji Temple 29 Chugoku Kannon Pilgrimage

 

Daisenji was said to be founded in 718 when a man, while hunting a deer, came to the realization that killing was a sin and so became a monk and enshrined a statue of Jizo in a hermitage on the mountain. 

In 865 it became a Tendai sect temple and grew into a major shugendo site with 160 temples and 3,000 warrior monks.

Of course, in early Meiji when Shugendo was outlawed and the government decreed the separation of Buddhas and kami, followed by a campaign against Buddhism, everything changed and many structures were lost.

What is now the main hall was the Dainichi Hall, and the Jizo was moved there.

Higher up the mountain where the main temple once was, a lodging facility was turned into a Shinto shrine, the okunoin of Ogamiyama Shrine I stopped in at on the way up the mountain.

A development of the Jizo faith that developed out of Mount Daisen was for the protection of livestock.

This led to Daisen Gyuuba Ichi, the only livestock market with a religious twist. By the Edo Period it was one of the top 3 livestock markets in Japan, and in the Meiji Period it was the biggest.

The statue of the cow is said to have been made out of the nose-rings of cows.

Nearby is a Goma Hall with Fudo Myoo...

And near to that the Kannon Hall, the goal for this pilgrimage.

From here the path leads further up the mountain to the Niomon. Obviously this was the entrance to the main temple in earlier times.

From the Niomon, the path goes up to the shrine.

At 700 metres, it is the longest shrine approach in Japan.

During the opening of the mountain ceremonies each year, thousands of people carrying torches snake up the path, making an awesome sight.

It was getting late, and I wanted to get down the mountain a bit, as I was sleeping out that night and it would be warmer the lower I would be able to get, so I chose not to go all the way up to the shrine

The previous post was on the Amida Hall at this site...

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Amida-do at Daisenji Temple

 

High on Mount Daisen was a major Shugendo site centred on Daisenji Temple.

At its peak, it had a huge number of sub-temples and other structures in three distinct areas, though with the separation of Buddhas and Kami followed by the suppression of Buddhism in early Meiji, they have been reduced to only 10 from 42.

In the former Saimyoin area the Amida Hall remains.

An earlier building was destroyed by a flood, but this version was built in 1552, and used some of the wood that was salvaged from the original.

The Amida statue inside was carved in the 12th century, and along with a pair of attendant statues and the hall itself, is an Important Cultural Property.

Behind the Amida Hall is a stone torii, all that remains of a Sanbo Koshin Shrine.

Sanbo Koshin is a Buddhist deity created in Japan. Sanbo refers to the three treasures of Buddhism, and Sanbo Koshin is a deity that protects the three treasures.

With a Buddhist deity, the shrine was destroyed in the early Meiji.

A path leads through the forest to the Sada River, with the other parts of the temple complex on the other side. There is now a road bridge just downstream, but the river can be crossed on foot most of the time.

Upstream, the banks of the river are lined with piles of stones. This is Sai no Kawara, a boundary between the world of the living and the dead where children who die before their parents wait and pile the stones before being saved by Jizo, the primary deity of Daisenji Temple.

The previous post was on the Yokai Temple Enjuin with 108 paintings by Mizuki Shigeru.

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Yokai Temple Enryu-in

 

One of the sub-temples of Daisenji, high up on the slopes of the sacred mountain Mount Daisen, is Enryu-in.

Many temples have painted ceilings where each small square contains a picture of flowers, animals, deities, etc.

Enryu-in is unique in having a ceiling with 108 paintings of Yokai, Japan's supernatural beings, including ghosts, monsters, poltergeists, shape-shifters, and spooks.

They were painted by Mizuki Shigeru, the famous manga artist who revived many of the traditional yokai and created many new ones.

He lived not far from here in Sakaiminato, and it is a mecca for manga and yokai fans. I have posted before on the yokai statues that line the street there: post 1, post 2, post3.

However, the temple has been closed to the public since 2018, so members of the public can no longer view this unique artwork.

The reason, they say, is that now that the cost of rebuilding the temple has been repaid, they are reverting to being a purely religious facility.

Quite a few people are kind of miffed about this. The yokai ceiling has attracted lots of visitors, so the town's tourist office is unhappy, but many, many potential visitors are also unhappy.

Mizuki Shigeru painted the ceiling for free, as a donation to help the temple raise funds. Countless thousands of his fans have donated to the temple, and so it seems a little churlish of the temple.

Anyway, you can enjoy my photos as I visited before 2018...

The previous post in this series was on the walk up the mountain.

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A Walk Up Mount Daisen

 

Day 45 of my walk begins in Yonago, the main city of western Tottori.

The next temple is high on Mount Daisen, the mountain that dominates the view and is the highest mountain in the Chugoku region at 1,729m.

Heading out of town I must be on the old San-in Do highway as there are numerous large, traditional properties....

Yonaga is not a big city, so I was soon out into the countryside, but there were still some large properties...

As I got closer to Daisen I stopped in at Ogamiyama Shrine, linked to the sacred site up on the mountain where I am heading.

As I left the flat plain and started the slow climb up the mountain, I found some lovely, old Buddhist statues in a roadside shrine, many coats of paint peeling away.

What I presume to be a folk-carving of a !,000 armed Kannon looks eerily like a sea creature or beetle

A little further, I stopped in at a couple of shrines, Okanari Shrine and Hiyoshi Shrine.

Passed by an army driving school.....

The road a little later was lined with tall pine trees. Believed to have been planted around 400 years ago to mark the route for travellers up to Daisenji Temple...

I am only going as high as the temple, about halfway up at about 900 meters above sea level.. However, the higher slopes of the mountain were covered in mist...

By early afternoon, I reached the small settlement below the temple. Now bolstered by the trade in food and accommodation for hikers of the mountain in summer and skiers in winter.

The previous post was on Okanari Shrine and Hiyoshi Shrine

If you would like to subscribe by email, just leave your email address in the comments below. It will not be published or made public. I post new content almost every day, and send out an email about twice a month with short descriptions and links to the last ten posts