Shugendo: A Faith That Fused Everything

In Japan, where a narrow land is hemmed in by steep mountain ranges, mountain worship has flourished since ancient times. Yet the hunter-gatherers of the Jomon and the farmers of the Yayoi held no such faith; the movement to seek the sacred in the peaks appeared far later in history. At its center stands En no Ozunu, also known as En no Gyoja. The ancestral figure of Japan's mountain ascetics, he was the fountainhead of the yamabushi (山伏)—the mountain hermits who would move quietly through Japanese society for more than a thousand years. In his legacy, fact and fable weave together so densely that he has come down to us as one of the most revered and mysterious figures in Japanese history.

I will write about this on another occasion, but that old faith comes from the native people who lived near Izumo Taisha in Shimane Prefecture. Japan, though, originally had no "mountain faith." It was brought by people who came from across the sea.

After more than ten thousand years of Jomon nature worship, the faith of Kumano changed greatly around the fourth century when a certain person came from India. He was a mysterious monk called "Ragyo Shonin" (裸形上人).

The name Ragyo Shonin is not a personal name. It means "the naked sage." It is thought to describe the look of Indian mountain ascetics in their robes. To the people of Kumano then, such a figure had probably never been seen.

Yet as En no Ozunu attained powers that seemed to transcend the gods, rumors began to swirl that he was plotting to overthrow the imperial court. In May 699, Emperor Monmu (reigned 697–707) accused the sixty-nine-year-old ascetic of using sorcery to instigate rebellion, exiling him to the remote island of Izu Oshima, far from the levers of political power. The episode is recorded in the official chronicle Shoku Nihongi, completed in 797. Even in exile, it is said that while he remained quiet during the day, by night he flew across the sea using his mastery of flight to practice austerities on Mount Fuji. Historically, it was En no Ozunu who became the first person to summit Japan's sacred mountain.

In 701, an imperial pardon brought an end to his banishment, and the court sought to welcome him back as a person of political influence. Yet on his journey from Izu Oshima back to Nara, En no Ozunu suddenly leaped into the sky and vanished. One tradition holds that he flew across the sea to Tang China to dwell among immortals. From that moment, he disappeared from human sight, leaving no further trace in the historical record. His death is traditionally dated to 701, though without confirmation; of what became of him, history knows nothing. Where could a figure of such formidable power have gone?

Mixing esoteric Buddhism from India, Daoism from China, and indigenous Japanese mountain-spirit worship, En no Ozunu forged a philosophy of his own. Today, his mysterious legend still lives in peaks and valleys across Japan.

Some of you who have visited Japan may have walked the Kumano Kodo, and the first to cut it open was En no Ozunu. He is generally known as the founder of Shugendo (修験道), a new religion that joined the Buddhist practice of mountain faith with Shinto belief. The reality is not so simple.

His greatest achievement was rather that he set up a religious outlook of his own by fusing all the religions, beliefs, secret arts, sorcery and medicine then reaching Japan.

So it is almost impossible to explain En no Ozunu or Shugendo in a word. As a first step, this time I will look at one of the most important sources of the Shugendo he established. That source comes from distant India.

Ragyo Shonin, who came from India, stepped down onto the land of Kumano, saw the majestic mountain range, remembered his home in India, and took Nachi to be an ideal place. He fused the mountain faith practiced in India with Japan's nature worship, which went back to the Jomon, and built a religious outlook of his own.

Ragyo Shonin brought to Japan the discipline of India's steep mountain country and a knowledge of medicine based on Ayurveda, spread his faith among the people of the region, and also worked to treat illness. One thing he brought to Japan was "training under a waterfall."

He won the trust of the local people and in time built Seiganto-ji beside Nachi Falls. This scenic temple, visited today by many tourists, was not built by Japanese. It was the first temple built by an Indian monk.

The political center then lay from southern Nara Prefecture to Osaka, in basins. Kumano, cut off by its mountains and remote, was spared political interference and was a fortunate place where faith could be practiced freely.

The wisdom from southern India that was cultivated in Kumano fused with the Jomon-period faith of Japan, and with elements of Chinese Taoism, Confucianism, Buddhism and medicine added, it nurtured a religious thought of its own.

The one who inherited this unprecedented new thought and developed it systematically was En no Ozunu, and that is Shugendo. It is not merely mountain asceticism.