Women on the Mountain

"It is better to encounter a deadly poisonous snake than a woman," say the Buddhist priests of the Shugen sect, who worship the Eight Dragon God, Hachidai Ryuo, at the temple of Japan's Mount Sanjogatake. For 1,300 years the Shugen monks have seen to it that no female climbed their mountain or entered their Ryusenji Temple. Undisturbed, they practiced their ascetic disciplines--walking barefoot through fires of logs and leaves while reciting sutras, plunging into freezing pools, hanging by their ankles over vertiginous cliffs while confessing their sins. (A favorite fillip of the monks is to dangle novices carelessly over a cliff, pretending to let go from time to time to help them attain a sense of man's helplessness.)

After World War II, a blight came upon the sacred mountain. First there were U.S. WACs, then a demoktirasi-style Japanese girl with knapsack and climbing boots. The beleaguered priests enlisted villagers to turn back any woman they found approaching the mountain. They rebuilt the trail to the top, making it difficult even for experienced climbers. But then came the fatal proclamation of the miko in Nara prefecture.

A miko is a kind of medium and rural sorceress to whom people come for advice on marriage and business. This particular miko had a large following of women in what the Japanese politely call "the water trades"--prostitutes, bar hostesses, geishas. The miko told them to worship the Eight Dragon God at the Ryusenji Temple. That tore it. Last week at Ryusenji, 200 dignitaries, headed by the Governor of Nara, chanted sutras and presented altar lilies to the brand-new vermilion temple, which was being dedicated to replace the old one, burned down in 1946. And 500 women arrived in buses and uprooted the stone tablet forbidding women to enter the temple compound.

Amid all the sake-gay festivity, the monks of Mount Sanjogatake were glum. Said 75-year-old Abbot Kaigyoku Okada: "Can a man meditate on the Buddha in the midst of passing geishas? That is why we sought mountain solitude. But now girls are to be allowed on our mountain, presumably with their boy friends. If one of my priests doing a cliff exercise happens to see a young couple, he may lose his balance and be killed." The abbot may have been thinking of a line popular with the mountain priests: "Woman is the root of disaster that even 500 reincarnations cannot absolve."

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