Ontake Satomiya Shrine
About a kilometer up from where we live in Otaki village rests Satomiya Shrine, the first stop on the pilgrimage trail up Mt. Ontake. At the heart of the main island, Japan’s second-highest volcano (3,067 m) has been a locus of worship and spiritual practice since ancient times.
Japan’s Shinto faith sees the world as alive and nature itself as divine, and the gates of Shinto shrines mark the boundaries between the sacred and the mundane. At Satomiya Shrine, passing through a granite gate from the 1800s, you ascend 381 stone steps to a cliff bound sanctuary that pays homage to the powers of the mountain. Followers of Mt. Ontake’s homegrown faith have been climbing these steps for centuries, and before that mountain ascetics known as yamabushi spent months on end in grottoes carved into the cliffs, performing the rituals and austerities required before pilgrimage to the summit.
When the snows melt and spring starts to settle in, I too feel its draw. Except for summer and early autumn, when the dwindling numbers of white-clad pilgrims arrive to perform their rituals, I usually have the shrine and its forest precincts to myself. Ascending the stone steps through towering cypress and cedar, some many hundreds of years old, there’s a sense of leaving the day-to-day world behind, of stepping into another realm. Along the way glowers an image of Fudo-myo, a wrathful looking esoteric Buddhist deity. Often found at waterfalls, he is known as a fierce protector of the Buddhist Dharma and is one of the yamabushi’s closest allies. Below the image, a bronze dragon roars from a stone grotto, as though in warning.
Along the cliff at the top of the steps are rows of ragged stone stela known as reijinhi that commemorate advanced practitioners of the Mt. Ontake faith. Tradition says that they harbor a portion of their spiritual energy, which is accessible to the living with proper preparation and ritual. Spring water percolates from a moss-bound section of cliff and through a bamboo spout into a stone basin. It’s wonderfully pure, and a long draft on reaching the top of the stairs is obligatory. Beyond the relatively recent main sanctuary, I follow a path deeper into the forested precincts, where today few ever go.
Day breaks over the far peaks down the valley. The shrine, most of the reijinhi, and the grottoes where the ascetics performed their rituals all face east towards the rising sun. Light streams through the cypress trees along the trail, and a tribe of Eurasian jays swoop among the branches. Passing below the cliffs, one foot falls before the other, breath sliding in, breath slipping out—just walking—thought when it arises another phenomenon, like the breeze in the branches, the crunching leaves.
On mornings such as this, you can catch a whisper of what drew the yamabushi here in the first place.