Mia-tachi no tabi - Day 13 - Up Another Holy Mountain

This morning we had a cheese tart for breakfast. We picked it up on our way back to the hotel last night. I mostly wanted it because I saw a line of people waiting to buy it, so I thought it must be good. I wasn't actually convinced my theory was correct however, so I tried it with some trepidation. It was delicious.

After breakfast, we happily said farewell to our Osaka hotel and made our way to Koyasan, the world headquarters of the Shingon sect of Japanese Buddhism. 

We were able to catch the limited express and thus were able to enjoy a nice long comfortable ride. We bought lunch at the station to eat on the train. We we worried there wouldn't be any food (small station), but then Rich spotted a Horai. 551 Horai is a Chinese chain that must be limited to the Kansai area, since I haven't seen it anywhere else, but it is all over here. They sell three things: nikuman, gyoza, and shumai. I've had the first two and they are both good, but Rich was daring and tried the shumai, which he pronounced excellent. 

We reached our hotel with amazing easy. It was like 20 steps from the bus stop and had a sign in romaji.  We checked in easily, were shown our rooms and given a short intro to the schedule for the services and meals here, then were left on our own. Here is a picture of the temple we are staying at:

We chose to get three rooms, since it seemed to be the same price as one room (fees are per person). So we have tons of space:

After gloating about our rooms for a bit, we set off to find Okunoin, the cemetery I visited the last time I was here with Myra. It turned out to be really close to where we were staying.

We found the grave of Uesugi Kenshin, same as last time, but this time a was a little easier, since I knew what it looked like and it had a sign in English. 

The sign was new. It is probably a product of Koyasan's upcoming 1200 anniversary in 2015 which is generating a great deal of interest. Having just visited Hieizan yesterday (which celebrated its 1200 anniversary a while ago), I was not as impressed with it this time. It is a pretty good number though.

Okunoin is the largest cemetery I've ever been to. It took at least 20 minutes to walk to the other side. It is full of graves from as far back as the 1600 to as recently as this decade (most recent date I saw was 2008). It is one of my favorite places in Japan.

We walked through Okunoin and visited the temple of the other side. I don't what it is called and if I really cared I could probably figure it out, but maybe not, since there are 117 temples on Koyasan. Here are some pictures anyway.

Then we walked back through the cemetery and returned to our lodging. We collected our bath supplies and enjoyed a nice soak before returning to our rooms to wait for dinner. I started working on my sutra tracing, which is an exercise that Buddest monks do to concentrate or something. The monk who gave me the supplies instructed me to write while thinking of a wish, the end with my name, the date, and  the wish. He told me that I could take it with me when I left or leave it to be ritually burned.

I only got half way through before we were called to dinner. Dinner is served in the room on little trays.

The food was fun, though of course not all of it was to my taste. Since we are in a Buddest temple, it was a vegetarian meal. There were a couple kinds of tofu, tempura, rice, soup, soba, pickled veggies, seaweed jelly, and Asian pears for desert. The pears were really good. I tried some of almost everything (no seaweed jelly for me) and ate most stuff. Only really liked the soup and tempura though.

After this entertaining meal we were all ready to go to bed... Except it was only 6 so we had to find entertainment until a more reasonable sleeping hour.