hrh

You're probably not as naive as I am, so you probably won't be as disappointed as I was to realize that the crazy guys and nice women at the temples with the mummies will not let you take pictures of said mummies. Sadness. Also, I feel bound to relay the instruction that I have received. These mummies are NOT mummies. No indeed, they are sokushinbutsu, which is to say that they achieved buddhahood during their lives, perhaps in the process of dying. More about that in a minute, but get that King Tut disembowling-and-wrapping stuff out of your head!

Basically, I dragged my intrepid husband off to Yamagata Prefecture to see the mummies and the mountains. We climbed the Dewa Sanzan (Mt. Haguro, Mt. Gassan and Mt. Yudono), which are gorgeous, and are centers for shugendo--i.e., mountain religion--and pilgrimage.


This is the gate to Gassan, where there were still some snowfields (albeit small ones) left in mid-August.

Yudono has a fantabulous shrine in a narrow gorge below the peak (and yes, you guessed it, no photos allowed, the spoilsports). It centers on a huge rock, maybe 4 meters high, which is all golden brown and covered with scallopy sulphur scales. A hot spring--and it is hot--bubbles up over the rock, and you can climb up, hot-potato-footing-it, to the top, to peer down over the waterfall that splashes down from the cold-running stream into the valley below. You have to have a purification done before you're allowed in, and you have to go barefoot. It knocked me out and challenged my soles.


These pilgrims are hanging out around the entrance to the shrine.

OK, so back to the (non-)mummies. Back in the day--we're talking 18th-19th century--men in the the northwestern part of Honshu, especially in the old Shonai domain, started to engage in severe ascetic exercises. At least around Yudono, these guys definitely identified themselves as Buddhist practitioners, but whether they were ordained monks or not looks to be a much trickier question. Anyway, they gradually restricted their diet, apparently over a period of three years or longer. First they stopped eating grain, which is a time-honored practice in Japan that you can trace way back, pretty much to the earliest historical sources and Chinese Daoist antecedents. Anyhoo, these guys gradually came to subsist on things like pine needles and grasses. And then, when they weren't subsisting so much as fading, some of them drank lacquer so as to coat their insides. The idea behind all of this was to preserve their bodies, and thereby to continue existing in this world to save other folks. Well meant, but, well, ouch. If a practitioner's body became dessicated enough that it didn't putrify, then that became evidence for his achievement of buddhahood.


This is Shinnyokai, who is at a temple called Dainichibo about 8 km from Yudono. He became a buddha/died/transformed in 1783. There are more images of Shinnyokai available because Daincihibo sells laminated pictures of him as talismans. The one I have says, "Hail the Holy Man Shinnyokai [Namu Shinnyokai Shonin]" on the back. I keep it in my purse.

In addition to mummies and mountains we saw...more mountains! And temples. This is Yamadera, very famous and totally awesome on the edge of Zao Quasi-National Park (also in Yamagata).


From there we went straight into Zao to walk the ridge between Jizo Dake and Katte Dake, between which is the turquoise caldera of Okama:


It had kind of slipped my mind how god-awful flat it is around here. But now that I think about it, I live in a big, metropolitan hole. Maybe it's just romanticism, but I really have a thing for the high-country and the backwoods wafflestompers.