S P O T ／ SPOT-079

Seki Zenkō-ji Manji Kaidan Meguri (Swastika-Shaped Pitch-Black Pilgrimage)

関善光寺 卍戒壇巡り（宗休寺）せきぜんこうじ まんじかいだんめぐり（そうきゅうじ）

Beneath the main hall of Seki Zenkō-ji — a small Tendai temple in the cutlery town of Seki — runs the only known kaidan meguri ('precept-platform pilgrimage') in Japan laid out in the shape of a Buddhist manji (the swastika that is one of the oldest symbols of the dharma). The corridor is 49 meters long — exactly the 49 days of the bardo between death and rebirth in Buddhist cosmology — and the visitor enters by descending into a pitch-black underground passage, holding a rope along the left wall, and feeling forward in total darkness. Somewhere in the dark hangs a metal lock said to be the 'key to paradise'; touching it is the spiritual climax of the rite, and the only way to find it is by patient touch in absolute blackness. The disorientation produced by walking blind through a swastika-shaped corridor at the precise length of the 49-day bardo is, by design, a controlled rehearsal of death and rebirth. Visitors with claustrophobia or heart conditions should not attempt it; everyone else should expect a few minutes of complete sensory deprivation followed by a quietly altered state of mind.