Mountain temple with tengu, foxes and... octopus

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I am back to Sendai after 3 days with my friend and colleague Prof. Gereon Kopf (Luther College), his colleagues and his students.
The theme of their 3 and a half week study trip is Disaster and Enlightenment (Hong Kong and Japan).

1st day: pilgrimage to Mount Takao (Takaosan, 高尾山) close to Tokyo. The temple there is both Shingon Buddhist and Shinto. Japanese do not separate religions, they integrate various functions, rituals and symbols in the same sacred space.

Gereon explained that there are 5 levels of divine beings in this kind of Buddhism and at a certain level you have the Tengu: they have wings, enormous noses and they are larger than humans.
And of course you have kitsune foxes...

Pilgrims offer this kind of "shoes" to the temple.
Some decided to offer tengu-sized slippers.
Obviously the tengu is not only a Buddhist divine being also a Shinto kami —a source of energy— popular in the mountains.

When humans recognize something as a kami or source of energy they sometimes put a rope called shimenawa around it, e.g. around this tree - or the one in Miyazaki's My Neighbour Totoro.








Do you have an idea what you could pray for —and how— thanks to this octopus?
Well - if you lift it and then you put it (OKUTO) down,
you will pass (PASU) the exam!!!
Thanks prof CY Cheung for explaining this to me (among other more serious stuff).



And here you have a snap shot of some of the pilgrims. And the beautiful temizu basin (temizu ya). I am glad that I have a shinto shrine close to my home in Amsterdam, where shintomaster Paul de Leeuw taught me a lot about Shinto: http://shinto.nl/.


This is dinner - have a look at the menu... how could have we ordered anything without Gereon?!


Tomorrow I will tell you about our second day, when we saw the mummies. Goodnight!

Comments

  1. yokoarisaka24 January 2019 at 08:05

    πŸ‘πŸ‘πŸ‘ Oooh awesome you got to see Gereon and his troop! 😊😊

    ReplyDelete

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