Koyasan - a night in a temple

Only about an hour or so from central Osaka, Koyasan is a small temple town on the top of a mountain, and the centre of Shingon Buddhism. Temples are everywhere you turn, and we even spent the night in one... It was an incredible experience.

We spent the day walking around the beautiful town. Summer in Osaka is horrible... so hot and humid. It was far cooler in Koyasan and that alone makes it worth the trip! Everywhere you turn there are temples. It feels like instead of streets being lined by houses, they are lined by temples. It's fantastic.

  There is also a huge cemetery that we spent a fair few hours exploring. There were loads of old, creepy stones. But surprisingly, we also saw gravestones for big companies like Panasonic, Yakult and UCC (a coffee chain). For us this felt really weird, but businesses in Japan have much more of a family feel I suppose... I'm still not 100% sure why they do this, so please enlighten me!

Then, after exploring we checked into our temple. Here is one of the rock gardens..

 And a pond..

And the view of another rock garden from our room. It was unbelievable beautiful. The sliding doors from our room open up to this incredibly peaceful view.

Jonny and I even joined the monks in a 40 minute mediation... It was a great experience, but wow, it was a very long 40 minutes. Neither of us can switch off easily and we spent a fair chunk of the time fidgeting. Sorry! Our dinner was special vegetarian Buddhist cuisine too. A great thing to try!

AND (sorry, this is such a long post. Koyasan was truly one of our highlights so far), as if we weren't happy enough, we were super lucky and by chance there was a special annual festival that night. Mandokuyo-e, or the Candle Festival. 100,000 candles were placed along the pathways of the graveyard to honour the spirits. 

It didn't photograph so well, but it was beautiful and had a very friendly vibe. Japanese girl scouts were handing out candles for everybody to place in the ground, and you could feel the sense of a proud community.

The next day we were supposed to embark on a three day hike. Unfortunately the weather was terrible, so we had to cancel and return home :(... But before we knew this, we headed on a nighttime walk to buy some more snacks and water for the hike. On our way we saw this incredible temple...

  

Beautiful. I was so relaxed after our evening. We came back to the temple, relaxed in the hot bath, admired the view with the sound of rainfall and finally went to sleep. A real Japan experience. Unforgettable.