Mount Kōya

Mount Kōya is a wooded basin in the Kii range, ringed by eight peaks like the petals of a lotus, where the monk Kūkai founded the headquarters of esoteric Shingon Buddhism in 819. Local Shintō deities, the hunter Kariba and the goddess Niu, were said to have guided him there with white and black dogs.

Kūkai spent his last years on the mountain and, when he died in 835, was entombed without cremation at Okunoin; the faithful hold that he entered eternal samadhi and waits there in meditation for Maitreya, the future Buddha. Around the Danjō Garan sanctuary grew a monastic town of over a hundred sub-temples, from which Kūkai's disciples spread Shingon across Japan.

Toyotomi Hideyoshi built Seigan-ji there in 1593 in memory of his mother, and the Tokugawa shoguns patronised its head temple Kongōbu-ji.