13/08/2024
Hiking on a mountain day.
If you look around in Japan, you will see some kind of mountain in most places. That is how familiar mountains are to the Japanese people. However, some mountains are not "hometowns" that warmly embrace us; they are sacred places where spirits and gods live, and other worlds where ancestral deities live after the spirits of the dead have been purified. For this reason, ancient people had two ways of approaching mountains. One was to worship them from the villages at the foot of the mountains, and the other was to venture into the mountains and gain the power of ancestral deities and gods. The latter was Shugendo, and "shugen" means entering the mountains, acquiring miraculous powers, and demonstrating efficacy.