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A Sort of StillnessBy Chris W. Gladden
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Early one morning last summer, I sat on a floor cushion gazing out at the mountain village in Japan that I now call home. Lush rice fields stretched toward the river against the far green hills; a stream gurgled nearby; the sound of the temple bell drifted in on the breeze. I savored my coffee and the morning’s tranquility.
Then the cutting of grass commenced. A weed eater nearby rumbled awake, then another farther away. Soon the entire village was awash in a two-stroke engine roar. With the meticulousness of urban lawns and golf courses as the modern ideal, rural Japan wages a relentless battle with its grass from spring through fall when it stops growing. Along rice fields and roadsides, in yards and long abandoned vegetable plots, the grass seems to never be quite kempt enough. Villagers tell me that maintaining it accounts for 50 to 70% of their copious amount of outdoor work. One result is that this idyllic landscape sounds like a Cessna landing strip for part of the year.
I’ve learned to cope. But that morning, with the peace of moments before still in my mind, I longed for some genuine quietude. But where? Throughout Japan’s recorded history, sages and hermits have escaped the hubbub of town or village life by heading to the mountains. While I’m no sage, as the weed eaters roared, this suddenly seemed like a fine idea.
So I loaded the car with camping gear and set out for Togakushi, a rugged mountain range in northern Nagano Prefecture that has been an object of veneration for over a thousand years. Togakushi roughly translates to “The Hidden Door,” in part, a nod to a remoteness that implies few will ever find it. I could only wonder what stillness might await on the other side of the door.
One of the best-known myths of Japan’s Shinto faith involves Amaterasu, the sun goddess who spun the heavens and mountains and waters with her divine loom and kept the rice fields verdant. One day her ill-tempered brother Susanoo flew into a rage and rained havoc on her fields, throwing a dead pony into her loom for good measure. In despair, she fled deep into the Earth, sealing the cavern with a tremendous boulder, vowing never to return. The whole of creation fell into utter darkness. With the world on the verge of extinction, the rest of the gods gathered to devise a plan. After much discussion, they threw the greatest party the universe had ever seen before the entrance of the cave. When Amaterasu cracked open the stone door to see what the ruckus was, she gazed into her own visage in a mirror of the gods’ making. Mesmerized, she stepped from the cave, returning her light to the world. At that moment, one of the divine revelers flung the cave’s great stone door to the heavens, ensuring Amaterasu would never retreat into eternal darkness again. Where the stone crashed to earth, the myth says, it formed the Togakushi range.
An old pilgrimage trail runs along the foot of the mountains, visiting various Shinto sites on its way to Okusha, the innermost shrine and final goal for many seekers. I set out early the next morning at Hokosha, the first of these sanctuaries. Legend says Hokosha was founded in 1058 when a celestial light shined in the trees delivering a message: build a shrine here for worshipers year-round. Okusha is a further 10 kilometers in and a challenge to reach in the winter.
Hokosha’s towering shrine gate marks a boundary where the pilgrim symbolically leaves the regular world and enters the realm of the divine. At the top of a flight of ancient stone steps, I paused before the main sanctuary. Wooden and weathered bone gray, the eaves are intricately carved with mythical beasts and a flowing dragon with mother-of-pearl eyes gazing downward. I stood dappled in morning light as birdsong floated from the age-old cypress grove.
Then the roar of a vehicle overwhelmed the birdsong. This was my first indication that a road parallels the historic trail in some places, including directly below Hokosha Shrine. A truck growled past. It was time to head further into the forest.
At the rear of the grounds, a signpost reading Kanmichi—the path of the gods—marks where the pilgrimage continues. The well-maintained gravel track eventually turns to earth and winds through a mixed woodland of chestnut, cypress, and oak. Occasional lichen-covered stone deities and diminutive shrines dot the way. Eventually, the trail reaches Chusha Shrine halfway along the route. As I ascended its stairs, a single drum’s ritual beat reverberated gently through the grove. Next to the sanctuary falls a cascade with a sacred rope draped before it and a stone carving of the dragon deity Ryujin to the side.
Togakushi Shrine is rooted in a blend of Japan’s native Shinto faith and Buddhism. In ancient times this was the case throughout the land, with Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines often occupying the same precincts. This syncretic tendency continued until the faiths were forcibly separated in the late 1800s at the start of Japan’s modern age. Since that time, Togakushi has been officially designated as Shinto. Yet Buddhist elements, like the esoteric dragons and the sacred waterfalls once used by pilgrims for purification before ascending the mountain, speak to a different age. Today, benches allow visitors to rest and contemplate the waterfalls, which I took full advantage of, allowing the shrine’s ambient noise to wash over me and the dance of the falls to fill my ears.
The crunch of gravel soon snapped me out of my tranquil reverie, as a Lexus crept past through the shrine grounds and made a K-turn among the worshipers.
I returned to the trail and soon left the last vestiges of town behind. After a time, the drone of a conch shell wafted in on the breeze. And then…a temple of the Shugendo sect…a blend of mountain worship, ancient Shinto, and esoteric Buddhism. The faith’s practitioners, known as yamabushi—those doing prostrations in the mountains—were the first to come here on pilgrimage and make Togakushi a locus of spiritual practice. Only the murmurings of the natural world and the drone of their conchs announcing their presence would have punctuated the silence. The thirty-three grottos that they used for ascetic training dot the Togakushi mountains. The trail that accesses the caves is part of a wider network that forms a mandala over the landscape with other mountains in the range, a replica in the physical world of the Dharma realm of esoteric practice. This extended pilgrimage survives today.
Near the Shugendo temple, I saw my first clear view of Togakushi’s jagged peaks, rising like teeth from a dragon’s jaw. From there, just another half hour remained before reaching the woodland entrance to Okusha. The innermost shrine marks the most prominent grotto on the mountain, and the first reached via the pilgrimage trail. I took a deep breath of the still highland air. Those yamabushi had it right, I thought and continued on, the broadleaf forest glowing in the late morning sun. Another blow of a conch shell filtered through.
And then, from parts unknown but all too close, the familiar rumble as a weed eater started up and was soon whining with abandon.
The map of the area indicated there was a parking lot near the approach to the inner shrine. Given Togakushi’s “hidden” status, I assumed it would be one of the compact roadside affairs found at trailheads. The sudden traffic inching past as I descended from the forest disavowed me of that notion. Many of the historic locations throughout the Togakushi region are what modern Japanese refer to as “power spots,” natural areas imbued with healing Earth energy that purportedly provide a range of benefits. As it turns out, Okusha is considered the most powerful and lucky of them all.
The parking area was jam-packed, but I was soon back on the pilgrimage route, now a broad gravel path leading to the Zuishinmon, a thatch-roofed vermillion gate built in 1710. Beyond it, the approach that runs the last 500 meters to the inner shrine is lined with a magnificent cedar avenue of 400-year-old giants. And now I was truly in the thick of it. The “hidden door” had been discovered long before; I proceeded at a crawl through the throng filling the grove. Deeper in, the trail narrowed, and the foot traffic grew thicker still. Near the inner shrine, visitors jostled for spots to snap selfies before a small cascade that the yamabushi once used for austerities. A man strolled past in a T-shirt reading, Are you serious? Do it quickly.
And then, at the foot of a cliff, Togakushi’s most sacred spot at last came into view. The Okusha Shrine sanctuary was founded in the 800s, just as Japan’s mountain asceticism was taking root. Approaching this holy of holies nestled in the midst of an ancient forest, for an instant I sensed the promise of my journey could be at hand.
And there I stood, gazing up from the melee at Okusha, now a modern structure with precisely none of the atmosphere of the rest of the Togakushi shrines. I briefly considered joining the sightseers waiting to toss a coin in the offering box to pay their respects. The line snaked down the trail into the woods.
Beside the Okusha sanctuary, an interesting, yet understated sub-shrine resembling a weather-beaten mountain hut marks the entrance to another grotto. It is dedicated to Kuzuryu, a nine-headed dragon deity of esoteric Buddhist lore. Local legend says it awoke when the stone door from the sun goddess tale crashed to earth. Kuzuryu was seen as a protective deity of the region, an elemental force of water and rain who the yamabushi called on to bestow wisdom. According to the sign planted in front of this sub-shrine, the deity also provides “the miraculous boon of healing toothaches,” an apparently more recent discovery.
Heading back down through the scrum, I noticed a branch off the main path. The map said it led to a historic stone carving of Fudo Myo-o, one of esoteric Buddhism’s most revered deities. He’s often depicted as a raging figure in an aura of fire, holding aloft a sword used to cut off the roots of ignorance. At the start of the trail was a sign with a laminated poster of one of the area’s moon bears, with bold, red script warning of the potential dangers ahead.
Soon, the noise of the masses slipped away, and I found myself hiking beneath the peaks on a neglected trail that was not part of the official pilgrimage. As such, I suddenly had a whole portion of the mountain to myself. For the first time, the going grew steep and rocky, and before long the trail nearly vanished in thigh-high sasa bamboo. Eventually, the trail arrived at a cliff with a small cascade. There, about 15 feet up the rock face, was the ancient carving of Fudo Myo-o. Heavily weathered and covered with lichen, it stood in a three-meter wreath of flame.
Sitting on the woodland floor, the only sounds the tumbling of the stream and the wind passing through the forest, I ate a tuna sandwich and contemplated what one has to go through to find a bit of quiet. The often omnipresent roar of our times was all but unknown to humankind until recent decades. Now the countryside booms. The sacred peaks crawl with climbers. I wondered how the modern-day yamabushi manage to find the solitude needed for their devotions. No sooner had the thought floated across my mind than the scream of motorcycles, a mile off down in the valley, sliced through the peace. Fudo gazed on unperturbed.
The wail of the bike tribes continued unabated as I began the return hike down the mountain. Then another sound floated from below. The drone of a conch. Before long, a pair of yamabushi jostled up the trail in my direction. They were dressed in traditional white: a hakama and suzukake—a short, kimono-like jacket and baggy pantaloons— tabi shoes, and a cotton headcloth tied like pigtails that fell on either side of their heads. Their conch shells hung across their shoulders in a woven net and tanuki-pelt sacks were tied to their waists. This was just who I needed to see.
As we neared each other, I paused and hailed them. They were heading up for training, following a rarely used path that ascends from near the Fudo carving to the grottos among the peaks. The Togakushi range is composed of precipitous crags, and I thought the zeal of the bikers would certainly reach them, too.
“Too bad about all the noise,” I said to these masters of the mountains.
They gave me a curious look. “What noise?”
I pointed down the path towards the valley and the now oppressive whine. With puzzled expressions, they tilted their ears. “Oh yeah!” one said with a sudden flash of recognition. “What a racket.”
The other yamabushi drew a smartphone from his fur pouch.
“It doesn’t bother you?” I asked.
His head tilted ever so slightly. “Well,” he said, “it’s a busy world.”
Checking the trail map on their phone, they continued on toward the mountain peaks.
I made my way back to the valley and to the village, hoping to appreciate whatever moments of stillness I might find.
Then the cutting of grass commenced. A weed eater nearby rumbled awake, then another farther away. Soon the entire village was awash in a two-stroke engine roar. With the meticulousness of urban lawns and golf courses as the modern ideal, rural Japan wages a relentless battle with its grass from spring through fall when it stops growing. Along rice fields and roadsides, in yards and long abandoned vegetable plots, the grass seems to never be quite kempt enough. Villagers tell me that maintaining it accounts for 50 to 70% of their copious amount of outdoor work. One result is that this idyllic landscape sounds like a Cessna landing strip for part of the year.
I’ve learned to cope. But that morning, with the peace of moments before still in my mind, I longed for some genuine quietude. But where? Throughout Japan’s recorded history, sages and hermits have escaped the hubbub of town or village life by heading to the mountains. While I’m no sage, as the weed eaters roared, this suddenly seemed like a fine idea.
So I loaded the car with camping gear and set out for Togakushi, a rugged mountain range in northern Nagano Prefecture that has been an object of veneration for over a thousand years. Togakushi roughly translates to “The Hidden Door,” in part, a nod to a remoteness that implies few will ever find it. I could only wonder what stillness might await on the other side of the door.
One of the best-known myths of Japan’s Shinto faith involves Amaterasu, the sun goddess who spun the heavens and mountains and waters with her divine loom and kept the rice fields verdant. One day her ill-tempered brother Susanoo flew into a rage and rained havoc on her fields, throwing a dead pony into her loom for good measure. In despair, she fled deep into the Earth, sealing the cavern with a tremendous boulder, vowing never to return. The whole of creation fell into utter darkness. With the world on the verge of extinction, the rest of the gods gathered to devise a plan. After much discussion, they threw the greatest party the universe had ever seen before the entrance of the cave. When Amaterasu cracked open the stone door to see what the ruckus was, she gazed into her own visage in a mirror of the gods’ making. Mesmerized, she stepped from the cave, returning her light to the world. At that moment, one of the divine revelers flung the cave’s great stone door to the heavens, ensuring Amaterasu would never retreat into eternal darkness again. Where the stone crashed to earth, the myth says, it formed the Togakushi range.
An old pilgrimage trail runs along the foot of the mountains, visiting various Shinto sites on its way to Okusha, the innermost shrine and final goal for many seekers. I set out early the next morning at Hokosha, the first of these sanctuaries. Legend says Hokosha was founded in 1058 when a celestial light shined in the trees delivering a message: build a shrine here for worshipers year-round. Okusha is a further 10 kilometers in and a challenge to reach in the winter.
Hokosha’s towering shrine gate marks a boundary where the pilgrim symbolically leaves the regular world and enters the realm of the divine. At the top of a flight of ancient stone steps, I paused before the main sanctuary. Wooden and weathered bone gray, the eaves are intricately carved with mythical beasts and a flowing dragon with mother-of-pearl eyes gazing downward. I stood dappled in morning light as birdsong floated from the age-old cypress grove.
Then the roar of a vehicle overwhelmed the birdsong. This was my first indication that a road parallels the historic trail in some places, including directly below Hokosha Shrine. A truck growled past. It was time to head further into the forest.
At the rear of the grounds, a signpost reading Kanmichi—the path of the gods—marks where the pilgrimage continues. The well-maintained gravel track eventually turns to earth and winds through a mixed woodland of chestnut, cypress, and oak. Occasional lichen-covered stone deities and diminutive shrines dot the way. Eventually, the trail reaches Chusha Shrine halfway along the route. As I ascended its stairs, a single drum’s ritual beat reverberated gently through the grove. Next to the sanctuary falls a cascade with a sacred rope draped before it and a stone carving of the dragon deity Ryujin to the side.
Togakushi Shrine is rooted in a blend of Japan’s native Shinto faith and Buddhism. In ancient times this was the case throughout the land, with Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines often occupying the same precincts. This syncretic tendency continued until the faiths were forcibly separated in the late 1800s at the start of Japan’s modern age. Since that time, Togakushi has been officially designated as Shinto. Yet Buddhist elements, like the esoteric dragons and the sacred waterfalls once used by pilgrims for purification before ascending the mountain, speak to a different age. Today, benches allow visitors to rest and contemplate the waterfalls, which I took full advantage of, allowing the shrine’s ambient noise to wash over me and the dance of the falls to fill my ears.
The crunch of gravel soon snapped me out of my tranquil reverie, as a Lexus crept past through the shrine grounds and made a K-turn among the worshipers.
I returned to the trail and soon left the last vestiges of town behind. After a time, the drone of a conch shell wafted in on the breeze. And then…a temple of the Shugendo sect…a blend of mountain worship, ancient Shinto, and esoteric Buddhism. The faith’s practitioners, known as yamabushi—those doing prostrations in the mountains—were the first to come here on pilgrimage and make Togakushi a locus of spiritual practice. Only the murmurings of the natural world and the drone of their conchs announcing their presence would have punctuated the silence. The thirty-three grottos that they used for ascetic training dot the Togakushi mountains. The trail that accesses the caves is part of a wider network that forms a mandala over the landscape with other mountains in the range, a replica in the physical world of the Dharma realm of esoteric practice. This extended pilgrimage survives today.
Near the Shugendo temple, I saw my first clear view of Togakushi’s jagged peaks, rising like teeth from a dragon’s jaw. From there, just another half hour remained before reaching the woodland entrance to Okusha. The innermost shrine marks the most prominent grotto on the mountain, and the first reached via the pilgrimage trail. I took a deep breath of the still highland air. Those yamabushi had it right, I thought and continued on, the broadleaf forest glowing in the late morning sun. Another blow of a conch shell filtered through.
And then, from parts unknown but all too close, the familiar rumble as a weed eater started up and was soon whining with abandon.
The map of the area indicated there was a parking lot near the approach to the inner shrine. Given Togakushi’s “hidden” status, I assumed it would be one of the compact roadside affairs found at trailheads. The sudden traffic inching past as I descended from the forest disavowed me of that notion. Many of the historic locations throughout the Togakushi region are what modern Japanese refer to as “power spots,” natural areas imbued with healing Earth energy that purportedly provide a range of benefits. As it turns out, Okusha is considered the most powerful and lucky of them all.
The parking area was jam-packed, but I was soon back on the pilgrimage route, now a broad gravel path leading to the Zuishinmon, a thatch-roofed vermillion gate built in 1710. Beyond it, the approach that runs the last 500 meters to the inner shrine is lined with a magnificent cedar avenue of 400-year-old giants. And now I was truly in the thick of it. The “hidden door” had been discovered long before; I proceeded at a crawl through the throng filling the grove. Deeper in, the trail narrowed, and the foot traffic grew thicker still. Near the inner shrine, visitors jostled for spots to snap selfies before a small cascade that the yamabushi once used for austerities. A man strolled past in a T-shirt reading, Are you serious? Do it quickly.
And then, at the foot of a cliff, Togakushi’s most sacred spot at last came into view. The Okusha Shrine sanctuary was founded in the 800s, just as Japan’s mountain asceticism was taking root. Approaching this holy of holies nestled in the midst of an ancient forest, for an instant I sensed the promise of my journey could be at hand.
And there I stood, gazing up from the melee at Okusha, now a modern structure with precisely none of the atmosphere of the rest of the Togakushi shrines. I briefly considered joining the sightseers waiting to toss a coin in the offering box to pay their respects. The line snaked down the trail into the woods.
Beside the Okusha sanctuary, an interesting, yet understated sub-shrine resembling a weather-beaten mountain hut marks the entrance to another grotto. It is dedicated to Kuzuryu, a nine-headed dragon deity of esoteric Buddhist lore. Local legend says it awoke when the stone door from the sun goddess tale crashed to earth. Kuzuryu was seen as a protective deity of the region, an elemental force of water and rain who the yamabushi called on to bestow wisdom. According to the sign planted in front of this sub-shrine, the deity also provides “the miraculous boon of healing toothaches,” an apparently more recent discovery.
Heading back down through the scrum, I noticed a branch off the main path. The map said it led to a historic stone carving of Fudo Myo-o, one of esoteric Buddhism’s most revered deities. He’s often depicted as a raging figure in an aura of fire, holding aloft a sword used to cut off the roots of ignorance. At the start of the trail was a sign with a laminated poster of one of the area’s moon bears, with bold, red script warning of the potential dangers ahead.
Soon, the noise of the masses slipped away, and I found myself hiking beneath the peaks on a neglected trail that was not part of the official pilgrimage. As such, I suddenly had a whole portion of the mountain to myself. For the first time, the going grew steep and rocky, and before long the trail nearly vanished in thigh-high sasa bamboo. Eventually, the trail arrived at a cliff with a small cascade. There, about 15 feet up the rock face, was the ancient carving of Fudo Myo-o. Heavily weathered and covered with lichen, it stood in a three-meter wreath of flame.
Sitting on the woodland floor, the only sounds the tumbling of the stream and the wind passing through the forest, I ate a tuna sandwich and contemplated what one has to go through to find a bit of quiet. The often omnipresent roar of our times was all but unknown to humankind until recent decades. Now the countryside booms. The sacred peaks crawl with climbers. I wondered how the modern-day yamabushi manage to find the solitude needed for their devotions. No sooner had the thought floated across my mind than the scream of motorcycles, a mile off down in the valley, sliced through the peace. Fudo gazed on unperturbed.
The wail of the bike tribes continued unabated as I began the return hike down the mountain. Then another sound floated from below. The drone of a conch. Before long, a pair of yamabushi jostled up the trail in my direction. They were dressed in traditional white: a hakama and suzukake—a short, kimono-like jacket and baggy pantaloons— tabi shoes, and a cotton headcloth tied like pigtails that fell on either side of their heads. Their conch shells hung across their shoulders in a woven net and tanuki-pelt sacks were tied to their waists. This was just who I needed to see.
As we neared each other, I paused and hailed them. They were heading up for training, following a rarely used path that ascends from near the Fudo carving to the grottos among the peaks. The Togakushi range is composed of precipitous crags, and I thought the zeal of the bikers would certainly reach them, too.
“Too bad about all the noise,” I said to these masters of the mountains.
They gave me a curious look. “What noise?”
I pointed down the path towards the valley and the now oppressive whine. With puzzled expressions, they tilted their ears. “Oh yeah!” one said with a sudden flash of recognition. “What a racket.”
The other yamabushi drew a smartphone from his fur pouch.
“It doesn’t bother you?” I asked.
His head tilted ever so slightly. “Well,” he said, “it’s a busy world.”
Checking the trail map on their phone, they continued on toward the mountain peaks.
I made my way back to the valley and to the village, hoping to appreciate whatever moments of stillness I might find.