The 'Living Buddhas' of Yamagata

   

There’s a tiny figure in a glass cabinet in this roasting hall. Sweating profusely, I size it up. It’s wearing a red robe and a headdress that resembles an upside down ice cream cone. Its knobbly fingers look like they’re made of very old and dark wood. The face is hideous: there’s a hole where the nose once was, and it’s missing an eye.

Churen-ji

This is the ‘living buddha’ of Churen-ji, a temple outside the minuscule hamlet of Oami in mountainous Yamagata. Just sixteen of these weird mummies remain in Japan. The bizarre appearance of these onetime priests is the product of a shocking diet, which involved years of plant food and a special tea made from poisonous tree sap. The final stage sounds terrifying: burial alive in a box with a breathing tube and a bell.

The bus stop in Oami

A female monk tells me that only about twenty foreigners a year make it to Churen-ji. There are few buses from sleepy Tsuruoka, and once you get off, you’re faced with a trek of several miles. When I make the journey, it’s 38 degrees, and I can feel my fair skin cooking in the sun. 

There’s a second mummy nearby, in the temple of Dainichibo, whose relative proximity to the bus stop makes it more accessible. Tall trees stand guard in front of the temple, beyond a lovely path lined with hydrangeas. 

The gate at Dainichibo

My sole interest here is with the mummy, but after paying my 500 yen, I am motioned to sit before an altar. A pair of giant drums adorns the room, along with a multi-coloured sheet. A bald-headed man in a black robe, presumably a monk or a priest, begins chanting and beating a drum. A shriveled old man in white, also bald, sits down beside me, placing his legs at an impossible angle. He begins to tell his beads. 

The approach to Dainichibo

The pounding of the drum ceases and the black-robed man grabs a wooden pole topped with white ribbons. He starts waving it over my head, once brushing it against my hair. He chants and stares at me, as though I’m being initiated into a cult. 

Dainichibo

The swinging of the stick ends and the old monk rises and motions me to follow him. We walk to a small and very bright room, and sit before a glass cabinet. The mummy is inside, clad in a reddish-orange robe. It is more skeletal than its counterpart in Churen-ji, and it has a diabolical grin. This ‘living buddha’, I read, died in 1783 aged ninety-six, having followed the plant food diet for an unimaginable seventy years.

Later I hitch a lift back to Tsuruoka. I regale the driver with the tale of my encounter with the ‘living buddhas’.

‘Why didn’t you go to Setaka?’ she asks. I know where she means, for I passed through it during my eight hour train ride the day before.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, there are mummies there.’

I let it fly, for why would I have missed this?

The view from Churen-ji