where cider meets condensed milk: Koya-san

where cider meets condensed milk

Sunday, November 05, 2006

Koya-san

In honor of Culture Day, Dani and I went cultural and visited the most sacred place in Japan for Buddhists. This picture combo doesn't quite work, but I'm not high-tech to do anything better with it. So, here it is: adventure on Koya-san! Koya-san is a mountain valley south of Osaka containing over 100 temples all clustered around a tiny town center. We mostly tromped around and tried not to commit inevitable faux pas and copied what the little pilgrims in white smocks and giant tour buses were doing.

Most of the temples are operational monasteries as well, and offer lodging. They serve you traditional vegetarian monk fare (shojin ryori) twice a day, which ranged from outstanding to strange to forest-twigs-mashed-into-cookie-form to slimy to mysterious.

Auspicious light shining upon an omiyage and sweets shop/cafe where we had mochi and tea.

Hey, what's in this little fridge...? No no, just kidding! I'm not touching anything and we waited until the street was clear to pose this photo. I still don't know what these little shrines signify, even after all these years...

Another thing I don't understand and always forget to ask about: these little statues wearing aprons and bibs.

The featured temple is Oku-no-in, in the forest outside of town. Walking in along the kilometre-long path under cover of mossy trees, there are a half million of these gravestones. If not for the voices of children, it would be completely spooky. Inside the temple there was a funeral service and lots of chanting and incense. We were swept along with the crowd into an underground area with walls composed of these tiny little Buddha statues lined up, each one numbered and engraved with a name. Several people pushed by us to locate the name of a relative. It was rather like being in some twisted post-office of the Buddhist afterlife, and very eerie.

I adore hotels and ryokan in Japan, but this is the first time I've had my room and food all prepared by a monk. Or, a monk-in-training, I should say. The monastery where we stayed was simple and nice, and our junior monks were really sweet and nervous. The second morning we dragged ourselves out of our warm futons to watch the meditation service at 6am, which was amazing. Predictably, there was incense and chanting and bell-ringing, and our legs wouldn't move properly after having to sit seiza, but fortunately we weren't hit with sticks (like Sarah and Chris were). I think it's nearly impossible to be around monks and not have terribly inappropriate songs running through your head, primarily "Hey hey, we're the Monkees" and "Brass Monkey", but I did my best to be mature and keep my thoughts centered. (People say we monkey around...)

posted by Raychaa @ 10:03 PM

1 comments:

At 12:35 PM, Al said…

Holy crap, y'all have a lot of festivals and holidays!