Encyclopedia of Buddhism Volume One A -L Robert E. Buswell

S PACE, SACRED
Monks in the Sacred Caves at Pak Ou, Laos. © Christophe Loviny/Corbis. Reproduced by permission.
cal topography, natural features (in particular, sources
of water), Buddhist monasteries, shrines to local gods,
and narratives formed a single coherent whole. In
other words, sacred spaces were fundamentally associated
with postulated recollections of the past and ritualized
practices, all tied up in attitudes and acts of
devotion or piety that have been collectively referred
to as geopiety by the human geographer J. K. Wright
and topophilia by Yi-Fu Tuan.
In contemporary Japan, about one hundred different
pilgrimage courses linking more than five hundred
monasteries in all parts of the country attest to the
complexity of sacred space and exemplify the equally
complex nature of the Japanese people’s spiritual and
emotional attachments to their land. Shikoku Island,
for instance, boasts of several mountains that were objects
of Shugendo practices, and it is also the site of
Japan’s most famous pilgrimage. Kukai, the founder of
the Shingon school of esoteric Buddhism, was born
there in the late-eighth century and he practiced austerities
in some of these mountains. During the medieval
period, Kukai became the object of a nationwide
cult, and a pilgrimage dedicated to him was established
around Shikoku Island; it consists of a course linking
eighty-eight monasteries, and is still quite popular.
Each monastery is sacred, obviously, but so is the entire
course, and many pilgrims consider Shikoku Island
itself to be sacred.
Historical, social, and economic aspects
Sacred spaces, however, have a history. To take one example,
Japan’s highest mountain, Mount Fuji, was
originally regarded as the abode of one local god; when
Buddhism took charge of the cult around the twelfth
century, the mountain came to be viewed as the abode
of three buddhas and bodhisattvas and of that god as
well, and it became a center of Shugendo. By the seventeenth
century, however, Shugendo’s influence
waned (for political reasons), and Mount Fuji became
the object of mass pilgrimages on the part of laypeople,
as a consequence of which the understandings of
the mountain’s sacred character radically changed. Another
example of major historical changes is the Ise
Shrine, located on the eastern coast of the Kii peninsula.
It is composed of an Inner Shrine dedicated to
the ancestral god of the imperial house, and of an
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