Mount Koya Day Tour from Kyoto

Overview

Eleven hours from Kyoto to Mount Koya and back — a monastic settlement in a high basin in the Wakayama mountains, founded in the ninth century and still functioning as the headquarters of an entire school of Japanese Buddhism. It is a long way for a day trip and the travelling is a real share of it. What waits at the end is not a temple to look at but a working religious town where one particular routine has not been interrupted since the year 835.

A meal, twice a day, for twelve hundred years

Kukai, the monk who founded the mountain and is known here as Kobo Daishi, is not held to have died. He is held to have entered eternal meditation in 835 and to be sitting in the mausoleum at the far end of the cemetery, still alive and still waiting.

Because of that, food is prepared for him and carried to the mausoleum twice every day, at six in the morning and again at half past ten. Robed monks bring the sealed boxes along the same path, and the ritual has been performed every single day for more than twelve centuries — through famine, war, fire and the collapse of the political order several times over. Whatever you believe about the premise, the persistence is a fact, and watching the procession pass is the single most striking thing on the mountain.

The cemetery is also a directory of Japanese industry

The approach to the mausoleum runs about two kilometres under enormous cedars and holds more than two hundred thousand monuments: feudal lords, monks, poets, whole clans. It is the largest cemetery in the country and easily the strangest.

Interleaved with the medieval stones are memorials raised by companies — Panasonic, Nissin Foods, UCC among them — placed here to pray for the continued success of the business. There is a monument in the shape of a coffee cup and another commemorating termites killed by a pest-control firm. The mixture is not irreverent by local standards; it is the same logic applied consistently.

The rest of the mountain

Beyond the cemetery are the great pagoda and lecture halls of the central complex, and the head temple of the school with its rock garden and painted screens. Over a hundred temples on the mountain still take overnight guests, which is how most people would prefer to see it if a day trip were not the constraint.

Practical shape

Six of the eleven hours or so go on travel, over mountain roads and a substantial climb. The basin sits high enough to be several degrees colder than Kyoto and holds snow well into spring. Paths through the cemetery are uneven stone and root, poorly lit under the trees, and shoulders should be covered in the halls.