S P O T ／ SPOT-236

Yamadera Daibutsu (Risshaku-ji Okunoin Daibutsuden)

山寺大仏（立石寺 奥之院・大仏殿）やまでらだいぶつ

To reach this Buddha, you must earn it. At the very summit of Yamadera—the mountain temple of Risshaku-ji, founded in 860 by the great master Ennin—1,015 stone steps wind up through a forest of fantastically eroded crags. Climb them all, roughly an hour of breathless ascent, and you arrive at the Daibutsuden, where a golden seated Amida Buddha some 5 meters tall sits filling its hall almost to bursting. It is not Japan's largest Great Buddha, but it may be its most hard-won: a gleaming colossus installed where the mountain runs out of mountain. Beside it stands the Okunoin (Nyohodo), enshrining images of Shaka and Taho that Ennin is said to have carried back from Tang China, fronted by a bronze lantern ranked among Japan's three greatest. This is the place where Matsuo Basho, in 1689, heard the cicadas and wrote one of the most famous haiku ever composed—"Stillness — sinking into the rocks, the cry of cicadas." Faith, asceticism, literature, and a glittering summit Buddha converge in a single rare landscape.