Koyasan

Joules and I took a break from the heat and humidity of Kyoto to spend a few cooler July days in the picturesque town of Koyasan, south of Kyoto and Osaka. It’s a small town full of temples built on a plateau high up in the forested hills.

Being a temple town most of the accommodation is in temples. We stayed the first night at Rengejoin described in our guidebook as elegant, which it certainly was and the second night at the nice youth hostel. We arrived just in time for dinner, which had been prepared and laid out in one of the front rooms, overlooking the dry, white raked gravel garden. Temple food is called shojin ryori, a special cuisine prepared by monks. As well as an absence of meat and fish there is no use of garlic or onion. Visually it is stunning, though even for a vegetarian some of the tastes took a bit of getting used to.

Our accommodation for the night was in a tatami room overlooking a second garden, full of trees and shrubs and a few koi carp swimming in the pond. At 6am a loud gong was sounded and which was the cue to attend the morning temple service. I managed to arrive before the head priest, which I was quite proud of, considering my dislike of early starts. The head priest and 4 other monks chanted for about 45mins and it was relaxing sitting listening to them in the incense filled morning air.

In the days we wandered round the sites of the town, including the interesting head temple of the Shingon school of Esoteric Buddhism, which had some gorgeous painted screens and a massive rock garden. Another area called the Garan had a huge stupa, Daito, a very impressive building. We also visited the cemetery Okunoin, a massive place. It wais a strange experience to walk along the paths towards the Lantern Hall, as the rays of sunlight filtered through the trees and the stone and wooden grave markers and statutes became almost ghost like in the haze.



The oddest place we found in the town was a small temple by the side of the road. Behind the altar was a mini museum of Buddhist artefacts from around the world, the best of all being the Buddhas backlit by multicoloured flashing LED screens. Fab!