Narrow Road To The Deep North 42

Kakugyo Tobutsu founded the modern cult of Mount Fuji. In his late teens, Kakugyo began to lead the life of an ascetic, and moved northward, into a cave in Mutsu province. Here he had a dream vision of En no Gyoja, the night flight wizard founder of Shugendō, who asked him why he had undertaken so arduous an ascesis. Kakugyo answered with a lamentation. 

“At the wish of my father and mother.” He said. “The world is present in ceaseless warfare, so that the very Sovereign, above, is ever uneasy in his mind; and so that the people, below, are suffering. I wish to bring comfort to these, but it is beyond human power to do so. Therefore I have undertaken this great practice.”
En no Gyoja told him to relocate to the ‘Pillar of the World.’ In 1560, Kakugyo move into the Hotoana, a celebrated cavern on the west side of Mount Fuji. Here he began a bizarre activiy of tsumetachi-gyo tip-toe practice. Kakugyo stood in the Hotoana on a piece of wood less than two square inches in area, neither moving nor sleeping, interrupted only three times day and night for rigorous bouts of mizugori, repeated immersions in cold water.
Kakugyo’s object of devotion was Sengen, the mountain-as-deity, who finally appeared to him with the gift of a mystical illustration of Fuji.
“The diagram I have given you is the pillar of the world.” He said. “Your great practice too is the pillar of the world. Thus your practice of standing upon the square of wood is to be the pillar of the world.” 
In reconceiving Fuji as a truly cosmic mountain, as the cosmos itself, and in becoming identical with the mountain, Kakugyo had brought heaven and earth into attunement, and made the birth of a stable order possible. In 1583, Sengen told Kakugyo to expect the arrival of the samurai that heaven had designated to be the ruler over generations to come. Ieyasu was essential for the success of Kakugyo’s mission, to carry out the work of establishing the peace and abundance.
The Fuji legend acknowledges Ieyasu’s deepest gratitude to Kakugyo and to Sengen for his every success. Kakugyo’s instructions, took the form of three sermons, the first offering the ten main principles of his deification.


1. Mt Fuji is the ‘pillar of the land’ and the ‘root origin from which 
    the ten thousand things are born.’
2. Hence it is thanks to the divine might of the deity of Fuji that the 
    ‘Offspring of the Divine Grandchild (the emperor) rules from 
    generation to generation.’
3. Kakugyo had accomplished a most difficult practice ‘as the first 
    condition of Ieyasu’s rule.’
4. Ieyasu is winning the land, not for himself, but for the sake of all 
    the people
5. Heaven provides man with all he needs.
6. Nonetheless, modesty and frugality are essential. ‘Outside of 
    rice, salt and water, all else is foolish pride.’ Again, ‘ one who \   
    does not know this is not in accord with heaven.’
7. One who is thus attuned to the mind of heaven with flourish  
    prosperously, and likewise his descendents for many generations. 
    One who does not will be destroyed.
8. In this situation, the people shall live out their lives in security, 
    and each person shall honorably ‘ preserve his inherited station.’
9. As shogun, Ieyasu will be the ‘fountainhead of all things’ and 
    likewise the ‘source of kami and Buddhas,’ Thus his teaching 
    will make him the ‘origin of the world’s teaching.’
10. When the shogun is the ‘source of kami and Buddhas’, evil is 
      crushed, and virtue is rewarded; provincial governors and   
      government officials are loyal to theur lord; and the people 
      observe the five relationships. Under these circumstances, the 
      shogun fulfills the function of, for example, shakyamuni 
      himself.

On one occasion, Kakugyo came down to Edo with two disciples, to help relieve an epidemic raging in the capital. His success came to the attention of the Bakafu authorities that, puzzled by these unusual men, detained them on suspicion of being Christians. The officials demanded to know what deity they worshipped.
“We reverently serve our two parents and the five grains; and morning and night we worship Fuji Sengen Daibosatsu, the sun and the moon. We have not other objects of worship.”
Kaugyo’s affirmation of Fuji as the central pillar of the world coincided with an affirmation of the centrality of Ieyasu’s role in the restoration of harmony in the land. The first Tokugawa shogun was posthumously deified with the name Tōshō Daigongen the ‘Great Gongen, Light of the East.’ the prefix Dai meant great, and a Gongen was a buddha who has appeared on Earth in the shape of a kami to save sentient beings.
After the first anniversary of his death, Ieyasu’s remains were reburied at the Tōshō-gū Shrine, in Nikkō. The mausoleum's architecture became known as gongen-zukuri, gongen-style. Robyn and I climbed his hill, and walked up into the light of the east.


                              ‘The star swooped from the heavens.
                               I searched among dead leaves
                               But could not ever find it.’
                                                                     Tsuboi Shigeji