“Your eyes should be neither open nor closed,” explained the monk at the front of the room. “They should be sort of sleepy — like a Buddha.” It was my first time meditating, and I was anxious about making some sort of conspicuous misstep. I squinted, then tried to relax my eyelids, but inadvertently began to focus on the bright orange cushion of the person in front of me. I closed my eyes with an inward sigh of exasperation at having such a difficult time following instructions. The monk leading the session told us cheerfully that it might help to rest our vision on the tips of our noses.
I was sitting in the carpeted meditation hall of an 1,100-year-old Buddhist temple in Koyasan, in a mountainous region of southeastern Japan. The hall was separated from the temple’s garden by only a thin sliding wooden door, and the air inside was crisp and piney, threaded with smoke from incense burning on the altar. About 15 other sleepy-eyed tourists from the United States, Europe and Australia (the class was for English-speaking visitors) surrounded me across the floor, steadily counting their breaths. tai chi and meditation retreat
Koyasan is one of the premier destinations for Buddhist pilgrims in Japan, and is considered one of the holiest sites in the country. It was chosen 1,200 years ago by the monk Kobo-Daishi for its lotus-like geography — a shallow valley nestled into a mountain — to be the headquarters of Esoteric Shingon Buddhism. The religion, which dates to the Tang dynasty, places an emphasis on daily ritual as a means of reaching enlightenment in an immediate, practicable way, developing what several monks described as a “Buddha nature.” Over the course of the last century, the religion’s birthplace has also attracted an increasing number of visitors without any background in Buddhism — visitors who seek out mountains, peace, history, or just a fleeting connection with the mysticism of another time.
I came for a little bit of each of these, teased by the promise of a remote corner of the country, thousands of miles removed, both physically and mentally, from the frenetic anxieties of New York. I wanted to challenge myself to a place with a different logic and rhythm, and to see myself disappear briefly into the magnitude of a 1,200-year-old rite. Also appealing was the prospect of a place that was truly dark at night — a place where the thick, spindly velvet of steep, tree-covered mountainsides soaks up the darkness completely. And like many others, as I would learn, I also wanted something a little bit naïve and capitalistic: to buy an ascetic experience.
THE MOUNTAIN IS DOTTED with a total of 52 shukubo, temples that historically offered overnight lodging to pilgrims. Most of these have also begun to welcome non-pilgrim tourists in recent decades (there are a dozen or so holdouts). For $80 to $150 per night, per person, you can sleep on a tatami mat on the floor of a traditional guest room in a 1,000-year-old temple, eat the monks’ traditional vegan fare, and participate in the daily meditation and prayer. A few of the temples advertise amenities like sutra writing classes, views of monks raking the gardens below, or natural hot springs to bathe in — features you can’t filter for on Airbnb or Hotels.com. And in the case of many of the temples, you can’t be totally sure what you are getting — an ambiguity that appealed to me in an era when every possible travel destination is so scrupulously documented and Instagrammed.
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