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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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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Kiyomizudera Temple 28 Chugoku Kannon Pilgrimage

There are many Kiyomizudera temples scattered across Japan. This one is in Yasugi, Shimane, and may very well be the oldest.

Kiyomizudera literally means "Pure Water Temple", and the most famous is the one in Kyoto.

The temple is very old with the date of 587 generally given for its founding.

According to the legend, an itinerant monk named Sonryu investigated the mountain where locals claimed an eerie light could be seen. He found an old man who gave him a statue of Kannon, and so the first, crude structure housing the statue was erected. Not long afterwards a spring of clear water appeared.

The temple had imperial support as well as from local powers and grew in stature.

At its peak it had 48 buildings, though now only 10 are left. It was the premier temple in the whole San-in region.

The main hall is dated to 1393, and is an Important Cultural Property along with several statues dating back to the Heian Period.

One of the huge trees lining the final set of stairs is said to be 1,000 years old.

In the Gomado next to the main hall are several Fudo statues and a Zao Gongen statue.

The stone statue of Fudo at the start of the climb up to the temple is particularly fine. Top photo.

In 847, a disciple of Saicho stopped here on his way back from China, and since then it has been a Tendai temple.

In the battles between the Amago and the Mori in the late 16th century, everything except the main hall was destroyed by fire.

The pagoda, the last remaining 3-storey wooden pagoda in San-in, was built in 1859.

Unusually, visitors are allowed inside to climb to the upper level.

There is quite a large Inari shrine in the temple.

I left via the Niomon and took a trail down the mountain. This suggests that in earlier times the temple was primarily approached from the East.

On the current approach to the temple there are two eateries offering traditional temple cuisine, Shojin Ryori.

The previous post was on the walk here from Unjuji Temple.

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.