Kinpusen-ji

This guide to Kinpusen-ji on Mount Kinpu near Nara turns on a gesture by Fujiwara no Michinaga, the most powerful courtier of Heian Japan, who in the year 1007 climbed the mountain carrying gold-inked scrolls of the Lotus Sutra, addressed to a reader who would not exist for billions of years. He buried them in a bronze cylinder beneath this slope, sealed against his fear that Buddhist teaching itself would one day fade from the world. Behind you stands the Zao-do hall that grew from that same devotion, home to towering statues of the mountain deity Zao Gongen, summoned here by the ascetic En no Gyoja generations earlier. Look up at the hall's scale before stepping inside.