Murayama Sengen Shrine
Murayama Sengen Shrine is known as the base of Murayama Shugen, the core of Fuji Shugendō. Its origin is said to lie in the mid-twelfth century, at the end of the Heian period, when the holy man Matsudai, who is said to have climbed Mt. Fuji hundreds of times, built Kōbōji here as a place of practice. Matsudai set up Dainichiji temple on the summit and opened Mt. Fuji as a sacred ground of Dainichi Nyorai, and Kōbōji was founded in the period when Mt. Fuji was changing from a mountain worshipped from afar into a mountain to be climbed.
In the medieval period Kōbōji was run by three powerful lodges known as the three lodges of Murayama: Daikyōbō, Chiseibō and Tsujinobō. It was here that Fuji-gyō, in which shugen practitioners led ordinary pilgrims to the summit, took shape. The Kōbōji Murayama trail, starting from Murayama, was a main route long called the Omoteguchi, the front entrance, and it developed as a path of practice for shugen practitioners. In the Edo period it was used mainly by pilgrims from the Kansai and Tōkai regions, who bathed in the sacred water at the Murayama purification place before heading for the summit. Two levels of yamabushi lived side by side, those who recruited pilgrims and ran lodgings and those who guided climbs as leaders, and they supported climbers of every rank, from warriors and nobles to commoners.
The Dainichi Hall in the precinct was the centre of Kōbōji and enshrines Dainichi Nyorai, regarded as the original Buddha of Sengen Daibosatsu. Inside the main surviving wooden seated Dainichi Nyorai (of the Kongōkai) an inscription reads “Grand Priest, former Governor of Noto, Tadatoki, and his son Chikatoki”, which suggests close ties between the Grand Priest family of Fujisan Hongu Sengen Taisha and Murayama Shugen. A Dainichi Nyorai statue inscribed with the date 1259 (Shōka 3) also survives, which shows that faith here goes back to the Kamakura period. The purification place, where climbers cleansed themselves in a cold spring before entering the mountain, also remains, and in the Edo period Fuji practitioners from the Kansai region bathed here before setting out for the summit.
The Meiji government’s separation of Shinto and Buddhism, and its ban on Shugendō in 1872 (Meiji 5), dealt a heavy blow to Murayama, a place where kami and buddhas had been worshipped together. Kōbōji was dismantled, and the three lodges, Daikyōbō, Chiseibō and Tsujinobō, came to an end. A seated Kannon Bosatsu once placed at the eastern Sai no Kawara on the summit of Mt. Fuji bears the name of the Grand Priest Fuji Chikatoki and the date 1493 (Meiō 2); it is now at Daikyōji (Shibamata Taishakuten) in Shibamata, Tokyo.
The number of climbers using the Murayama trail had already begun to fall around the Tenpō era in the late Edo period. In 1906 (Meiji 39) a new Ōmiya trail (the Kakesubata entrance) was opened, climbing from Ōmiya without passing through Murayama, and after that climbers stopped coming through Murayama. The Murayama route, used as the Omoteguchi since the Heian period, came to the end of its role.
The Dainichi Hall and the Sengen shrine still stand side by side in the same precinct, as they did in the age when kami and buddhas were worshipped together. In 2013 the shrine was inscribed as a component of the World Heritage property Fujisan: Sacred Place and Source of Artistic Inspiration.
