'The purpose of meditation is purposelessness.' The words of Ryusho Soeda make little sense to me as I sit in the darkness of a winter's dawn, numbed by sub-zero temperatures and facing a Buddhist altar veiled in incense smoke.
Soeda-san is the head priest of Rengejo-in, a 600-year-old shukubo, or temple inn, on the monastery mountain of Koyasan, on Japan's western Honshu island. The Kii mountains of Wakayama prefecture, of which this 1,000-metre-high forested massif forms a part, have long been regarded as an abode of the gods.
Each morning at 5.55am the shukubo's tannoy system croaks to life, calling to morning meditation and prayer its 15 resident monks and any pilgrims, or tourists, who happen to be lodging overnight. I fail miserably to see Soeda-san's 'purposeless purpose' as I crawl from beneath a toasty warm futon and into a courtyard filled with fresh snow and frosted pine trees. But there is no time to dwell on winter's wrath. I am late for an appointment with Buddha.
'The time it takes for a stick of incense to burn down is the amount of time you should spend meditating each day,' Soeda-san recommends. Seated in the perfumed gloom of Rengejo-in's temple, overlooked by images of fierce-looking deities and lulled by the sound of murmuring monks, I begin to warm to this ritual and try to empty my mind of all things trivial. It is a discipline many foreign visitors enthusiastically throw themselves into (surely with more success than me) during an overnight trip to Koyasan, where more than 50 shukubo offer bed, bath and Buddhist cuisine in historic temple surroundings.
Koyasan is the home of the Shingon-shu (meaning 'true word') sect, which follows an esoteric brand of Buddhism considered to be Japan's oldest. The monastic community was founded by a monk named Kukai who, in AD816, returned from China after studying Tantric Buddhism and built a temple for meditation and religious study. Known by his posthumous Buddhist name, Kobo-daishi, he remains one of Japan's most revered Buddhist figures and his mountain retreat, 1,200 years on, attracts more than half a million pilgrims and tourists every year.
The most popular approach to Koyasan is by train from Osaka, a two-hour ride up Wakayama's steep valley sides, through bamboo forests and hamlets. Visitors are delivered to Gokurakubashi ('Bridge to Paradise') station. A short ride aboard a cable car precedes arrival at the mountain top.