The Sacred Forest

This will be a boringly factual account of one place, but I promise to get weird again soon. However for now, I am happily overwhelmed at this Secret Forest that I've found. 

I'm in the mountains at Koya-san, staying at a Buddhist temple. There are lots of temples to choose from here, since Koya-san was originally formed as a getaway monastery (where women were not allowed) and has mushroomed to become a community of over 100 temples, as well as religious schools and a not unsubstatial amount of souvenir shops. Yes, here as elsewhere in Japan, I am not alone. However the remote location of Koya-san at least guarantees a much smaller crowd than one would expect for such a lovely location. 

All respect to the temples, but once you've seen about a thousand buddhist temples around the world, you've sort of seen them all. But what I hadn't seen the likes of before was the Koya-san Choishi Path, which once was the main approach to Koya-san and now a Unesco World Heritage site. It's a paved mountainside path in a wood of giant cedars with mossy gravestones, statues and monuments, the oldest dating to the 8th Century, when the path was first built. But most seem relative newcomers around the 15th and 16th Century.
This is still a very important route for the religious. Along this path are miraculous sites, such as the stone a very holy person was said to have sat on once\, another stone, which would feel heavy if you have a sinful heart and light if you have a pure heart (it felt heavy), and also a well, in which if you did not see your own reflection you would die within three years (thankfully I saw my reflection. May be a sinners life, but not a short one).

This place contains so many things I love: Mountains, old forests, moss, graveyards (I am a graveyard buff - and the older, mossier and more delapidated the better). A forest, but what a forest! Over 1300 huge, towering cedars, 200 to 600 years old and, at best, over 50 meters tall. These puppies are impressive!

And nestled in this forest, old stone monuments, posts and buddhas in a pictoresque state of disrepair and mossiness. As though becoming an organic part of the forest itself. 

Often people put hats on the heads or red aprons around the necks of the holy statues. The aprons actually look more like eating bibs for babies and create a strangely homey feel to the place, like in the picture below of the Buddha-family on a picknick>

Or here - Buddha pride:

Now I must gather my sinful bones and head for Osaka, leaving behind forest buddhas,  graves, cidars and a rather thin and hard mattress on a tatami floor.