Shinto and
the kami of the mountains

Japan is seventy percent mountain. Anyone who has seen the country understands: the mountains are not background. They are the main matter. Livable land squeezes into the narrow plains between them. The mountains themselves were long taboo — not because they were dangerous, but because they are inhabited. By Kami.

This is not a romantic idea from New Age brochures. This is the continuously documented spiritual stance of Japan for at least one and a half thousand years. And it goes deeper and more precisely than the Western term "nature religion" can hold. For viewers who have seen Princess Mononoke or Spirited Away: the kami of mountain, river and bath are not Miyazaki's invention. He drew them from a tradition still alive.

What Kami are

The word Kami (神) is usually translated as "god" or "goddess." That is imprecise. The religious philosopher Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801) formulated in his famous definition: a Kami is anything that possesses extraordinary power, beauty or dignity such that it awakens awe. It can be a sun deity. It can be an ancestor. But it can also be an ancient tree, a vast rock, a waterfall, an entire mountain.

The decisive thing: Kami are not above the world. They are in it. The mountain is the Kami. Not "the mountain has a Kami." Not "a Kami lives inside the mountain." The mountain itself is the spiritual being.

Whoever enters a mountain enters a body. Whoever does not behave reaches into that body.

The sacred mountains of Japan

Not all mountains are equal. Certain mountains are considered especially spiritually dense — by tradition, by shape, by history. Some of the most important:

Fuji-san

The most famous. Inside lives Konohanasakuya-hime (木花咲耶姫), the princess of blooming trees. The Fuji is not only beautiful — it is also a young volcano, last erupted in 1707. The pairing of beauty and danger makes it the very emblem of Japanese aesthetics.

Kōya-san

The sacred mountain of Shingon Buddhism, where Kūkai (Kōbō Daishi) entered nyūjō — meditative immersion — in 835 and, according to Shingon faith, meditates to this day. A living sacred landscape with 117 temples.

Haguro-san, Gas-san, Yudono-san · the Dewa Sanzan

The "three mountains of Dewa" in northern Yamagata prefecture. The heartland of Shugendō. Pilgrims walk them as a journey through birth, death, and rebirth.

Ontake-san

The second-holiest volcano in Japan after Fuji. Its own folk-religious tradition (Ontake-kyō). Mediums and healers gather there annually to this day.

Shugendō · the way of the mountain practitioners

Here the shamanic core becomes visible. Shugendō (修験道) means literally "the way of those who gain power through practice." Founded in the 7th century by the legendary En no Gyōja. Practitioners are called Yamabushi — "those who sleep in the mountains."

Yamabushi are not Buddhists in the narrow sense, nor pure Shinto priests. They are border-walkers. They carry elements of esoteric Buddhism (especially Shingon and Tendai), Daoism (Onmyōdō), Shinto, and pre-Buddhist Japanese shamanism. This is no lazy syncretism. This is systematically built up.

Their practice includes:

• Multi-day wanderings through remote mountain landscapes, often with food and sleep deprivation
• Ritual plunge-purifications under waterfalls (Takigyō)
• Recitation of mantras and dharani, partly in Sanskrit Siddham script
• Kuji Kiri and Kuji-In as hand seals for protection and energy alignment
• Drum, conch (Horagai), incense as ritual tools
• Direct communication with mountain kami through meditation and contemplation

These are not techniques for beginners. These are transmissions handed on in master-disciple lineages. But their basic stance — the mountain as a living counterpart — can be carried over.

Japanese aesthetics as spiritual category

What makes Japanese practice so precise is the link between spiritual experience and aesthetic language. Certain terms recur when encounter with Kami is at stake:

Wabi-sabi — the beauty in the transient, the imperfect. An old tree covered in moss. The crack in a tea bowl. The Kami does not show itself in the perfect — it shows itself in the aged, the grown, the changing.

Yūgen — the mysteriously hidden. What can be felt but not grasped. The morning mist. The mountain falcon that passes once and is gone. Yūgen is the mood in which Kami hint at themselves.

Miyabi — refined reserve. Not opulence but precise selection. Like the calligraphy of a single line that says more than a whole book.

These terms are not merely aesthetic. They are spiritual competence. To learn to recognize wabi-sabi is to learn to see a place as ensouled.

What we can take from this

Not everyone can travel to Japan. And Shugendō practice belongs in its lineage. But what we can carry over is the basic stance:

• The mountain, the lake, the tree is not scenery. It is a counterpart
• Approach happens through silence, not through explanation
• Ritual behavior (bowing, clapping, reverent silence) is not politeness — it is communication
• A place does not show itself on demand. It shows itself when the stance is right
• Whoever visits a place often will be recognized by it — this is observable, not imagined

The interesting thing: this stance is just as present in old European traditions. The Celts had their sacred groves. The Germans their offering trees. The Baltic peoples their lakes. Japan has preserved this stance — that is the difference. And exactly there lies its value for us today: as a mirror of what once was with us too.

Eileen at the Abe no Seimei Shrine

During her research stays in Japan, Eileen Wiesmann worked repeatedly at the Abe no Seimei Shrine in Kyoto — one of those places where Japan's layered depth is densely felt. Shinto, Onmyōdō, folk piety meet there. She describes the moment when the place "answered" as a turning point in her own research — academic distance turning into something more direct.

About this — and about Abe no Seimei himself, the most famous Onmyōji in Japan — there is a separate article on this blog.