Koyasan: Where art, architecture and tradition meet

For those who make the 90-minute rail journey south from Osaka, leaving the city behind for increasingly deep countryside before a cable car climb into Koyasan’s wooded mountains, Koyasan and its Unesco World Heritage sites offer visitors an unforgettable cultural experience.

A few minutes away from Kongobu-ji Head Temple, you might spot a different style of historic design, with the art nouveau-influenced Koyasan University Library, the first Western-style building in Koyasan when built in 1929. While the library’s rare manuscripts aren’t accessible to travellers, Nakamura hopes visitors stop at the nearby Koyasan Reihokan Museum to appreciate its collection of priceless Buddhist sculptures, paintings, calligraphic scrolls and implements. Although not all on display at any given time, the 78,000-piece collection includes 21 National Treasures and 149 Important Cultural Properties, with some work dating back 1,000 years.

That includes work by two hugely influential Buddhist sculptors working in the 12th and 13th Centuries, Unkei and Kaikei. A leading light of the Kei school of sculpture, Unkei is known for giving his work a sense of realism. Meanwhile “Kaikei’s work has a strong three-dimensional effect and beautiful facial and physical features,” Nakamura notes. “The way the muscles are sculpted leaves you feeling the character’s strength.”

An immersive night at a temple

Exploring Koyasan is possible as a day trip from Osaka or Kyoto, but for an even more immersive experience you could spend a night at one of the Koyasan temples offering traditional temple lodging. Called shukubo, these temple accommodations typically feature private guestrooms with tatami mat flooring and futon beds: very similar in design to Japan’s traditional ryokan inns.      

But where ryokan offer a window into refined Japanese hospitality, Koyasan’s 51 shukubo provide an opportunity to calmly soak up the atmosphere of temple life, while trying the monk’s plant-based shojin-ryori cuisine and (depending on the shukubo lodging) activities such as ajikan meditation, sutra copying and goma fire ceremonies.

With the shojin-ryori, you’ll be sampling a style of vegetarian cuisine that’s been prepared by generations of Buddhist monks, using tofu, in-season vegetables, seaweed and wild edible plants to craft multiple small, yet prettily presented dishes. Subtly cooked to bring out the ingredient’s natural flavours, shojin-ryori has a simplicity that invites visitors’ careful consideration and a mindful appreciation.

Such mindfulness is a common trait with optional temple activities, too. During an ajikan meditation session, you’ll sit cross legged and carefully control your breathing, which the monks believe expels negative energy and purifies the mind, while copying out the ornate calligraphy of sutra takes such focus that you can often become lost in calm concentration. If you’re staying at one of the temples that offers access to morning fire rituals (goma), you might be equally captivated by that spectacle: accompanied by drums and chanting, the goma sees a monk setting fire to a pile of sticks as part of a service said to send participant's prayers to the Buddha.    

While a temple stay is an unforgettable experience in and of itself, you could also use the opportunity to go for an evening stroll around the vast Okuno-in, where a gently lit 2km pathway leads through ancient forest, passing some 200,000 memorial towers before reaching the mausoleum of Kobo Daishi. According to Shingon belief, he sits there in eternal meditation. It’s even worth going back in the morning to take in the moss-covered statues and memorials more carefully by light, and perhaps glimpse groups of robed monks or white-clad pilgrims on their way to pay respects to Kobo Daishi.

Be it art and architecture or immersive experiences, there’s so much to discover at Koyasan, it might be difficult to absorb all the intricacies in one go. As Nakamura says: “Koyasan is a town with 1,200 years of history, with traditional parts but also regular parts of town. One visit isn’t enough. I hope visitors will feel that they want to come back [to experience more of it].”