Daikyōbō Cemetery and Temple Site

This is the cemetery and former site of Daikyōbō, one of the three lodges of Murayama.

Daikyōbō was a shugen lodge that regarded Hannya Shōnin Raison as its founder. In the Fuji Daigūji Keizu, the genealogy of the Fuji Grand Priests, Raison is listed as a cousin of the Grand Priest Fuji Naotoki, who died in 1345 (Kōei 4), along with the note “true bettō of Fuji, ancestor of the three lodges of Murayama”. However, some consider the genealogy handed down at Daikyōbō to be less than reliable, as it records the family’s clan and title names inconsistently (Sengen Jinja no Rekishi), and much of what is told of Raison’s deeds is legend.

Daikyōbō’s name appears as the jimu, or head of temple affairs, on the wooden seated statue of Dainichi Nyorai (of the Kongōkai) at Murayama Sengen Shrine, inscribed with the date of the third month of 1478 (Bunmei 10). At the time, Daikyōbō held the position of jimu and led Murayama Shugen, and it seems to have provided the workshop where the statue was made. According to Sengen Jinja no Rekishi, the head of Daikyōbō named in this inscription was an older brother of the Grand Priest Fuji Tadatoki. He succeeded to Daikyōbō in 1460 (Chōroku 4), took the name Hannya-in, and in 1478 repaired the shrine buildings and commissioned the principal image of Dainichi. During the Sengoku period, in 1558 (Eiroku 1), Imagawa Ujizane ordered Raikei to succeed to the post of Keikakubō and oversee the yamabushi of Suruga and Tōtōmi. On that same day, he was also granted the post of Yamamiya tayū at Fuji Ōmiya. Raikei’s wife was a daughter of the Grand Priest Fuji Nobutada. Among the three lodges, Daikyōbō served as bettō of the Daitōryō Gongen, which enshrines Matsudai Shōnin, the founder of Murayama Shugen. In 1641 (Kan’ei 18), Tokugawa Iemitsu granted it 26.5 koku by vermilion seal. Its dannaba, the districts of its followers, extended all the way to Osaka. Sengen Jinja no Rekishi records that the Dainichi Hall on the summit (now the site of the inner shrine of Sengen Taisha), managed by the three lodges of Murayama, was built in 1766 (Meiwa 3) by a Daikyōbō follower from Karamonochō in Osaka.

With the separation of Shinto and Buddhism and the ban on Shugendō during the Meiji era, Daikyōbō came to an end. According to the 1923 (Taishō 12) petition to raise the rank of Murayama Sengen Shrine, the family abandoned the Honzan school of Shugendō at the time of the separation, took a post at Murayama Sengen Shrine, and changed its name to Fuji Daikyō. The documents preserved at the lodge survive today as the Former Daikyōbō Fuji Family Documents. The lodge site itself is now farmland, with nothing remaining of its former appearance.

The cemetery still sits on a low hill at the edge of the village. Among the grave markers stands a memorial stone to Raison, erected in the seventh month of 1649 (Keian 2) and inscribed with the words “Founder of this mountain, Daisōzu Raison”.