Mt. Homan

Mount Hōman: A Granite Summit Above the Ancient Capital of the West

The summit of Mount Hōman stands 829 meters above the plains south of Fukuoka, its highest reaches a heap of weathered granite boulders. From the topmost rocks the land falls away toward two seas. Rain that lands here drains south as the Hōman River toward the Ariake Sea, or north through the Mikasa and Umi rivers toward the Genkai Sea. Early peoples read this watershed as a natural boundary and a place where the divine felt close.

Worshippers have climbed the mountain for more than twelve centuries. On a clear morning the line of hikers on its stone steps continues a habit older than written record in this part of Kyushu.

The peak rises at the northeastern edge of Dazaifu, the government seat that administered Kyushu and managed contact with the Asian mainland through the Nara and Heian periods. That position carried meaning. To officials of the eighth and ninth centuries, the northeast was the kimon, the direction from which misfortune was thought to enter, and the mountain came to be treated as a guardian watching over the capital below.

From Kamado Mountain to a Center of Mountain Worship

The earliest records reach back to the start of the ninth century, before the present name was in use. The chronicle Fusō Ryakki notes that in 803 the monk Saichō, founder of the Tendai school, had an image of the healing Buddha Yakushi carved at Kamadosan-ji, a temple at the foot of the mountain, while praying for a safe sea crossing before sailing to Tang China. The peak was then called Kamadoyama, or "cauldron mountain," a name later writers linked both to its shape and to a boulder near the summit. Envoys and monks bound for the continent climbed here to ask protection for the voyage and success in their missions.

The mountain deity gained official standing quickly. In 840 the Kamado kami was raised to the upper grade of junior fifth rank, an event set down in the Shoku Nihon Kōki, and the tenth-century Engishiki lists Kamado Shrine among the myōjin taisha, the most senior shrines of the realm. When the monk Ennin came back from Tang China in 847, he read sutras at the mountain temple in gratitude to the Kamado deity, as he recorded in the diary of his pilgrimage.

Over the Heian period the boundary between shrine and temple dissolved here. The mountain temple, known variously as Daisen-ji, Kamadosan-ji, and Uchiyama-ji, merged with Kamado Shrine into a single shrine-temple complex and grew into one of the leading Tendai houses in western Japan, eventually a branch of Enryaku-ji on Mount Hiei. Pilgrims' verses in the late-Heian song collection Ryōjin Hishō name the head temple of Kamado among the wonder-working sites of Kyushu. At its height the slopes are said to have held some 370 monastic lodges.

From the late Kamakura period the mountain turned toward Shugendō, the ascetic tradition that joined native nature worship with esoteric Buddhism, Shinto, Daoism, and yin-yang thought. Practitioners paired Mount Hōman with Mount Hiko to the south. Hiko represented the Womb Realm of the Buddhist mandala and Hōman the Diamond Realm, and yamabushi walked a circuit of peak-entry austerities between the two. A boulder at the middle-shrine site still carries an inscription from 1318 recording one such entry into the peaks.

War broke the rhythm. The Mutō Shōni clan, military governors of Chikuzen, fortified the mountain and drew it into the conflicts of the fourteenth century. In 1557 the warlord Ōtomo Yoshishige carried out a land survey and ordered buildings destroyed. From the following year the surviving community, the so-called Twenty-Five Lodges, moved their dwellings into two valleys on the mountain, Sai-in-dani and Tō-in-dani.

Recovery came under the warlords and domain lords who patronized the site, and the peak-entry rites resumed in 1594. In 1665 the community split from Mount Hiko to come under Shōgo-in, the Kyoto headquarters of one Shugendō lineage. That arrangement held until the Meiji government separated Buddhism from Shinto. Shugendō was banned, halls and images were pulled down, and by 1871 every lodge had converted to Shinto priesthood and left the mountain. Kamado Shrine carried on, later raised to imperial minor shrine rank.

Why the Whole Mountain Became a National Historic Site

What sets Mount Hōman apart is not a single building but the layered record kept across its slopes. Excavation has shown that ritual among the granite boulders of the upper shrine began in the eighth century, reached its height in the early ninth, and continued, with pottery cast down the eastern cliff, into the eleventh. Among the offerings archaeologists recovered are Nara three-color glazed ware, ancient coins, and worked talc objects. Researchers have noted how closely the pattern matches the state rituals on the island of Okinoshima off the Munakata coast, another place where the early Japanese state addressed the gods at the edge of the sea route to the continent.

Lower on the mountain the evidence turns architectural. Beside the southern approach at the lower shrine, foundation stones mark a hall built between the late Heian and Kamakura periods, its core five bays wide with a surrounding aisle. Stones beneath it, and the artifacts around them, point to an earlier hall of the eighth century, very likely one of the structures of Kamadosan-ji named in the old documents. Foundation stones of a late-Heian building also survive in the Daimon area, and in the Hontani valley researchers identified what is thought to be the base of a treasure pagoda raised by the monk Shōgaku in 933.

Ritual sites, hall foundations, caves, and the lodge ruins of the two valleys all survive in good condition, so the changing life of the site can be traced step by step from ancient times through the early modern era. Because that continuous record speaks so directly to how mountain worship developed in Japan, the Agency for Cultural Affairs designated the mountain, an area of more than 64 hectares, a National Historic Site on 17 October 2013.

Walking the Sacred Path

For most visitors the day begins at the lower shrine of Kamado Jinja, set among maples that draw crowds each autumn. The main approach climbs from here into dense evergreen forest along a route that is, for long stretches, a staircase of worn stone. One celebrated flight of roughly a hundred steps is known as the Hyakudan Gangi. The grade is steady rather than gentle, with springs and resting places spaced along the way.

Above the midpoint lies the site of the former middle shrine, on a level shelf at about 725 meters. A short detour leads to the boulder carved with the 1318 peak-entry inscription. Higher still the path passes the caves and springs that yamabushi once used in training, counted in tradition as five wells and seven caves. The largest, Hōjō-kutsu, holds a small image of the wrathful guardian Fudō Myōō and can be entered and walked through, a passage that ascetic practice treats as a symbolic death and rebirth in the womb of the mountain.

The summit rewards the climb with the upper shrine of Kamado Jinja among the bare granite and the Tsukushi plain spread out below, the view reaching to Hakata Bay and the Genkai Sea. The shift from the close forest of the climb to the open rock of the summit is part of why people have long felt the place charged with the sacred. Hikers who continue along the ridge can reach the neighboring peak of Buchōzan.

The tradition has not fully vanished. In 1982, marking 1,300 years since the death of the mountain's legendary founder Shinren, descendants of the Hōman yamabushi formed a new ascetic association, and each May they hold peak-entry processions and fire rituals on the mountain once more.

Planning a Visit

The trailhead at Kamado Shrine sits about a 30 to 40 minute walk from Dazaifu Station on the Nishitetsu line, or a short ride on the Dazaifu community bus, the Mahoroba-gō on the Uchiyama line, to the Uchiyama stop. Drivers reach the area in about 20 minutes from the Dazaifu interchange of the Kyushu Expressway. The shrine's main car park is reserved for worshippers, with a separate paid lot nearby for hikers.

A round trip on the main route takes most people four to five hours and involves continuous climbing, so an early start is wise, all the more because light fades fast inside the forest. Sturdy footwear and water make sense even though the path is well maintained.

The mountain sits within easy reach of Dazaifu's other landmarks. Tenmangū, the shrine dedicated to the scholar-deity Sugawara no Michizane, and the ruins of the old Dazaifu government office both lie a short distance away, as does the Kyushu National Museum. A literary trace lingers too: the Heian poet Kiyohara no Motosuke, father of the essayist Sei Shōnagon, once worked the mountain's name into a waka that played on its "cauldron" imagery across the seasons.