Osorezan

Josh Bloom
Sep 4, 2018 · 10 min read

“Hitotsu ni wa, kō no tashō o hakari, ka no raisho o hakaru.
Futatsu ni wa, onore ga tokugyō no zenketsu o hakatte ku ni ōzu.
Mittsu ni wa, shin o fusegi toga o hanaruru koto wa, tontō o shū to su.
Yottsu ni wa, masani ryōkaku o koto to suru wa, gyōko o ryōzen ga tame nari.
Itsutsu ni wa, jōdō to tame no yue ni, ima kono jiki o uku.

Itadakimasu.

First, innumerable labors have brought us this food. We should know how it came to us.
Second, as we receive these offerings, we should consider whether our virtue and practice deserve it.
Third, as we desire the natural condition of mind, to be free from clinging.
Fourth, we must be free from greed, to support our life we take this food.
Fifth, to attain our way, we take this food.

I humbly receive./Let’s eat.” — Gokan no ge/Verse of Five Contemplations

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[It was very difficult to decide on a picture to use here. I have a public Facebook album of all the photos I took, link here, but no single one does an excellent job at conveying the beauty and desolation of Osorezan. This is the closest I got: the rocky foreground with stains of sulfur, the green plant life determined to thrive, the Gokuraku-hama “Paradise Beach”, the lake and its far shore — the afterlife, hemmed in by the mountains in the far background, cutting us off from the rest of the world.]

Here’s some information on Osorezan: Wikipedia; The Japan Times; The Culture Trip. I recommend reading up on it first because I can’t and won’t include all the necessary information about the temple’s history and purpose here. I also recommend browsing my photo album in full, so you can appreciate the landscape and have a point of reference for various aspects I discuss.

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The smell of sulfur stung the air, leaving a permanent tang of rotten eggs in my mouth, and about five minutes after I arrived at the temple built on the gates to hell, the skies opened up and released a downpour the likes of which I haven’t seen in Japan since the typhoon in June. A Western framework would suggest that this was an act of Heaven, an attempt to drown this portal to the Underworld, but Buddhism doesn’t really work in strict dichotomies like that. This is a sacred place in Japan, not a cursed one. And just as quickly as it came upon us, the storm was gone and the ground greedily drank all the water.

At dinner later, there was one woman at my table who could speak and understand a little English (so long as, as instructed, I spoke slowly and said every word clearly). She translated for the other pilgrims-for-the-night, who were naturally curious as to why there was a young white man who had come all alone to this far-flung temple, hauling a large duffel bag and speaking no Japanese. Thus: “why have you come to Osorezan?” Why indeed.

I think it is partly because when I somehow learned about it, it looked like a unique experience to really dive off the beaten path, so once I knew I would be in the general area (or as close to it as I would likely ever be), I made a plan to deliberately come here, as difficult as it might be (I had to negotiate various buses and local train lines, none of which use English). A temple stay was always something I was curious about doing, and if I was to do one, I wanted it to be at a significant temple: either important culturally or important to me personally. The best known and highly sacred temple complex is Koya-san in Wakayama Prefecture, and that is a lot closer to where I had been staying in Japan in Kyoto and is not particularly difficult to reach via public transportation, so it was appealing at first, especially when I saw how beautiful some of the temples were. But then I began to notice online traffic from many tourists seeking to stay there. It was beginning to become commodified.

Nowadays, for better or worse, nearly all temple stays have been at least lightly commodified: many temples across Japan have guest houses to lodge visitors (Shukubo), standardized paperwork for you to fill out, a reservation service by phone, and probably a line in their budgets just for annual revenues from guests. I doubted that any of the Japanese guests who joined me that night in Osorezan were legitimate “pilgrims” — devout buddhists who had come with a pressing spiritual mission— they were just respectfully sight-seeing, as I was: observing and following the rituals with something less than complete faith. Of course, as native Japanese, they had a deeper connection to the traditions and ceremonies, so for them it wasn’t quite “tourism” and certainly not vacation. And unlike with me, there was no sense of intrusion in their presence there (not that I was made to feel unwelcome in any way — far from it. This is just my own self-perception.) It’s a small industry, still, and my guess would be that it has only existed for native Japanese until recently, with occasional serious international visitors wise to the opportunity. But now, like many things in Japan, this experience is no longer a secret. And the Westerners are flocking in droves for a taste of that authentic Japanese experience (the fact that it is actually quite removed from an average Japanese person’s experience notwithstanding.)

Osorezan, though, has still seemed to avoid detection. It is not a popular destination even for the Japanese, likely because of its remoteness and bleakness, as well as a healthy dose of superstition. The temple has blind mediums who enter trances during a summer festival and channel the dead. Not everyone’s cup of tea (I, for one, would be fascinated, but would feel too much the voyeur to attend without knowing Japanese *and* some Buddhist prayers). In any case, I chose Osorezan with this low profile in mind: I wanted to experience it before it, too, became a tourist hot spot.

And it is also a very sacred and spiritual place, and I wanted to see if I could tap into that. It is a temple for the dead, so I naturally said a prayer for my mom, without whose passing I would not have been able to take this trip, and, naturally, I would have been overjoyed had I somehow been able to make contact. But that wasn’t my primary purpose in visiting. I am not a spiritual person, and I pay tribute to her every day just by living my life. I was more interested in the greater atmosphere at the temple: what does standing at the gates to Hell feel like? What energy could I feel from the priests and from my fellow shokubo? Grief? Sympathy? Acceptance? Anger? Fear? Love? Or from the landscape?

Morning prayers begin at 6:30, with breakfast at 7:30, so I knew I had to go to bed early. I took my time picking my way across the rocky, vaporous hills surrounding the temple, noting with subdued solemnity the many small towers of pebbles, each supposedly built by the spirit of a young child who died before they could properly repay their gratitude to their parents. Instead they build these towers as offerings to the Buddhas, to pass the merit on to the parents. (Additionally, demons appear as the children build and knock the towers down, so the children’s spirits are trapped in a cycle of forever building these towers, and in return the Jizō Bodhisattva protects the children by hiding them inside the sleeves of his robe.) The pinwheels are gifts left by grieving parents to their departed children. Even one pinwheel is too many, so to see so many is certainly a sobering experience. But the best way to describe the overall experience is one of peace. It was beautiful and quiet and calm. My impression may have been different had I encountered parents actively mourning their recently deceased child, but for such a hellish (heh) landscape, the mood was positive.

Dinner was at 6:30. We all gathered into the dining hall, took our seats at long tables, and before we ate we were guided by the head priest in the prayer I quoted at the top. The temple was kind enough to provide me a sheet of paper with both the rōmaji (Japanese written with the Roman alphabet) and the translation, so I was able to hold my own with the other pilgrims. Japanese is not difficult to pronounce, but prayers are intoned more than spoken, so I had to listen for the rhythm and basic melodic pattern before I could raise my voice above a murmur. Finally with an itadakimasu we dug in to our vegetarian fare. I wasn’t sure exactly what everything was because I didn’t recognize the preparation, but I scarfed it all down, as well as a second helping of rice. I don’t think I would manage living at this temple long-term: there was nothing particularly bad, but neither was anything surprisingly excellent. Having finished my meal, I tried to excuse myself from my table only to be beckoned back by my neighbors — there was another prayer to be said. This one I did not have the Cliff Notes for, so I could only sit and listen until we reached “gochiso sama deshita” (lit. “it was quite a feast”), the standard expression after a meal.

Turning in for the night, I exercised in my room, made a pot of tea and meditated for a while. Finally I took a dip in the onsen, immersing myself in the sulfuric waters of Hell. In retrospect it was a good instinct to leave my jewelry in my room because, as I discovered the following afternoon, the sulfur in the air was already enough to react with the silver in my ring and necklace and tarnish them. Had I worn them into the bath, I would have had much more work cut out for me in reversing the reaction.

Prayers begin much too early for my taste, but there is something to having the temple empty of day visitors when conducting the service. Osorezan does not follow any specific sect of Buddhism: the first prayer, rendered up at the Jizōden Hall, is a general prayer for peace in everyday life; the second, at the Hondō, or main hall, is to give offerings to the souls of the dead. Apart from these two services, every ritual or custom at the temple was developed organically by local practitioners from “pre-modern times”. This location was considered sacred long before the current temple was established in the mid-16th century, so this is not wholly surprising, but it makes me better appreciate the synthesis of elements surrounding me. During the latter prayer a brazier with loose incense was passed around — I had to watch carefully to learn what the proper procedure was, and I don’t know if I successfully convinced anyone watching me that I was no rookie, but at least I didn’t spill the incense over my robe and the tatami mats like one of my fellow pilgrims! We are supposed to take a pinch of incense with our right hand, lift it to our forehead, then drop it in the brazier, where it will ignite and go poof. I still do not know if there is a system for how many times one is encouraged to do this: the woman before me did it three times, so I also did it three times. Does this mean I offered up a prayer for three different departed spirits?

Perhaps my enthusiasm eventually came back to haunt (heh) me, as the temple saw fit to humble me on my way out. When I departed that morning, I tripped at the front gate because I could not see over the large duffel bag I was carrying in my arms that there was a small step. Forward and down I went, my fall cushioned by said bag, which served as both instigator and hero of the incident. I should develop a healthy bruise on my right knee, especially taking into consideration that I will be sitting nearly non-stop for the next seven hours as I make my way to Tokyo, but otherwise I am well enough to respond to the numerous worried “Daijobu desu ka?” — “Are you okay?” — with a grimaced and humbled “Daijobu. Daijobu desu.” — “I’m okay. I’m okay.” Perhaps out of concern for my welfare, however, a fellow bus passenger gifted me a package of rice crackers, which was a welcome and thankfully unneeded contingency in case I did not have time to grab lunch in between legs of my journey to Tokyo.

The buses and trains went smoothly, despite my nerves: I knew I would eventually make it to Tokyo, but one has to reserve a shinkansen ticket in advance, and if I missed that train, I could not use the ticket on a later train. These tickets are mighty expensive, and I did not care at all to waste one and certainly not to buy another one. I would have to try to reserve a seat on a night bus instead, last minute, with no guarantee that there would be any room, and also inform my hostel that I would be coming very late (i.e. the next morning). So I was very glad when none of that happened. It would not have spoiled my trip to Osorezan — the experience was too special for that — but the only black marks are those marring my jewelry, and that’s a much smaller sacrifice.

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