The Self-Mummified Monks of Japan

In the mountains of Shōnai, in the north of Japan’s main island, stand the three sacred peaks of Dewa Sanzan: Haguro, Gassan and Yudono. For centuries they were a centre of Shugendō, a tradition of mountain asceticism that blended Buddhism, especially esoteric Shingon, with the worship of local kamikami The gods or sacred powers of Shinto, present in nature, ancestors and great people. Glossary. Mount Yudono, whose holy object is a hot spring flowing over a great rock, was the most secret of the three. Here a remarkable devotion took shape: the hope of becoming a sokushinbutsu, a Buddha in this very body.

The idea drew on a famous legend. Kūkai, the ninth-century founder of Shingon in Japan, died on Mount Kōya in 835, but Shingon tradition holds that he did not die at all. He entered a state of eternal meditation, nyūjō, in which he still waits for the coming of the future Buddha Maitreya, and monks still bring him meals each day. Ascetics of Mount Yudono hoped to follow his example, offering their own bodies for the salvation of others. In China, too, the bodies of revered Chan masters such as Huineng had been preserved and venerated for centuries.

Most of the Yudono ascetics were not high-ranking monks. Many were issei gyōnin, men of humble origin, sometimes former farmers, who took a vow of lifelong austerity at the mountain. They lived near temples such as Dainichibō and Chūrenji, collected alms, and are remembered locally for good works: building bridges and roads, digging wells, praying during famines and epidemics. To their communities they were holy men whose sacrifice would protect the region.

The northeast of Japan was a hard place to live in the Edo period. Cold summers brought repeated crop failures, and the great famines of the 1780s and 1830s killed many thousands in the region. Historians have noted that several of the ascetics are remembered for vowing their austerities on behalf of people suffering from famine or disease. In this setting, a man who renounced food altogether and offered his body could be seen as taking on the suffering of the community, much as a bodhisattva in Buddhist teaching postpones his own liberation to help others.

Temple traditions describe the path as lasting many years, though the details vary and much of what is told comes from later accounts. The central practice was mokujikigyō, ‘tree-eating practice’: renouncing cereals and living on nuts, seeds, roots and bark gathered in the mountains, often for periods counted in units of a thousand days. Combined with long hours of meditation, cold-water austerities and hard physical labour, this regime left the body extremely thin. Believers understood it as purification; modern scientists note that it would also have reduced the fat and moisture that cause decay.

When an ascetic felt death approaching, tradition says, he was placed in a small chamber or wooden coffin underground, with a tube for air, and continued to chant. After his death the tomb was sealed. Some years later his disciples opened it. If the body had dried without decay, it was dressed in robes and enshrined as a living Buddha; if not, it was reburied with honour. Sources and tradition agree that many attempts ended in this way, and that success was rare.

Scientific teams began examining the mummies of northern Japan in 1960, and their work, summarised in Western scholarship by Ichiro Hori and others, both confirmed and corrected the legends. The bodies are genuine human remains, with signs consistent with long fasting. But in many cases the evidence suggests that followers dried, smoked or otherwise treated the body after death, so that the boundary between self-mummification and preservation by the community is not always sharp. Historians emphasise that the honour came from the whole community, not from the ascetic alone.

The Meiji government, which came to power in 1868, set out to modernise Japan and to separate Shinto from Buddhism. Shugendō was banned in 1872, the shrines of Dewa Sanzan were reorganised as Shinto shrines, and many Buddhist temples on the mountains were closed or reduced. Entering the tomb alive came to be treated as assisted suicide and outlawed; the prohibition is often dated to 1879, though accounts differ on the exact measure.

The last ascetic usually counted, Bukkai, died in 1903 in Niigata Prefecture. Because the law no longer permitted the old practice, his disciples could not open his tomb as tradition required. His remains were excavated only in 1961, with the help of a scientific team, and are now kept at Kannonji temple in Murakami. His case shows how far the old devotion had outlived the law that forbade it.

Today about sixteen to twenty sokushinbutsu are known in Japan, most of them in Yamagata and neighbouring prefectures. Temples such as Dainichibō, Chūrenji, Nangakuji and Kaikōji keep them in glass cases or shrines, clothed in bright robes that are periodically renewed in ceremonies, with small pieces of the old robes given to pilgrims as protective charms. Visitors are asked to treat them as objects of veneration rather than curiosities.

Outside Japan, the self-mummified monks are often presented as macabre wonders, sometimes in sensational terms. Popular articles repeat that the monks drank a tea made from the poisonous sap of the lacquer tree to make their bodies unpalatable to insects. The story is widespread, but scholars note that it is poorly supported by early sources and may be a later embellishment. Claims that hundreds of monks succeeded, or that the practice was common across Buddhism, are also exaggerations.

Within Japanese Buddhism, the practice has always been exceptional and controversial. Many Buddhist teachers regarded extreme bodily austerity as unnecessary or even contrary to the Buddha’s middle way between indulgence and self-mortification. The ascetics of Mount Yudono belonged to a local mountain religion with its own logic, in which the body could become a vessel of compassion and protection.

For the people of Shōnai, the mummies remain local saints. Families visit them to pray for health, safe childbirth or relief from illness, much as their ancestors did. Read in this light, their story is less about death than about devotion: men who gave years of hunger and discipline in the hope of serving their neighbours, and communities that have honoured that gift for centuries.