Saigoku Pilgrimage- Japanese EventEvent"Thirty-Three Kannon Temples"
Also known as: 西国三十三所, Saigoku Sanjusansho, Saigoku Sanjūsansho, and 西国巡礼
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Description
Founded on a dead monk's bargain with the king of hell — in 718 CE, Tokudō Shōnin's spirit descended to the underworld, where Enma gave him thirty-three sacred seals and charged him with establishing a Kannon pilgrimage to save the living from damnation.
Mythology & Lore
The Dead Monk and the King of Hell
In 718 CE, the monk Tokudō Shōnin fell into a deathlike illness at Hase-dera in Yamato Province. His spirit descended to the underworld, where he stood before Enma, the king of hell who judges the dead. Enma was weary. Too many souls were arriving in his realm, he told the monk. Too many people were being condemned. He charged Tokudō with a mission: return to the world of the living and establish a pilgrimage circuit of thirty-three temples sacred to Kannon, the bodhisattva of compassion. To seal the charge, Enma gave him thirty-three sacred seals, one for each temple. The number came from the Lotus Sutra, whose twenty-fifth chapter teaches that Kannon manifests in thirty-three forms to save beings according to their needs.
Tokudō returned to life and attempted to establish the pilgrimage, but the people of his age were not receptive. Before he died, he placed the thirty-three seals in a stone coffin at Nakayama-dera, where they lay buried for nearly three centuries.
Emperor Kazan and the Revival
The retired Emperor Kazan had abdicated the throne and entered the Buddhist monastic order. While training at Nachisan Seiganto-ji in the Kumano mountains, the deity Kumano Daigongen appeared at his bedside and instructed him to revive the circuit Tokudō had been charged to create. Kazan traveled to Nakayama-dera and unearthed the buried seals. With a small company of monks, the former emperor walked the thirty-three temples himself, spreading devotion to Kannon at each site.
The circuit stretches across western Japan from the Kumano mountains through the temple centers of Nara, Osaka, and Kyoto. Hase-dera, the very temple where Tokudō had first descended to the underworld, is among its stations. Pilgrims carry a stamp book in which each temple records a calligraphic inscription and vermilion seal, and recite the Heart Sutra at every hall. The route became widely accessible to commoners during the Edo period, when improved roads opened long-distance travel beyond the aristocracy.