那谷寺 Komatsu, Ishikawa · around 40 minutes from Kanazawa
Natadera was founded in 717 by Taichō, the same practitioner who opened Hakusan as a place of ascetic practice. The two belong together.
The passage
Set into the cliff face is a cave, and a path runs through it. You enter, the light goes, you move through the dark over uneven stone, and you come out on the other side.
That is the whole thing. It is also the oldest ritual shape there is.
Going into the rock is going back into the earth. Coming out is being born. The practitioners who built this did not need to explain it, and the people who have walked it for thirteen hundred years have not needed the explanation either. You feel it in the body before any of it reaches thought.
If you take nothing else from this page: do not hurry that passage. Stop once inside, in the dark, and stand still before you go on. Whatever you want to leave behind, leave it in there.
The rest of the grounds
Natadera is weathered volcanic rock, moss, water and old trees laid out across a hillside. There are stairways cut into stone, small halls set into the cliff face, and a garden that is at its most striking in autumn, when the maples turn against the grey rock.
The poet Bashō came here on his journey to the north and wrote about the whiteness of the stone. He was not the first and not the last — the place has been pulling people in for a very long time.
Going there
Reachable from Kanazawa or Komatsu by car or bus. There is an entrance fee. Allow two hours; most visitors allow forty minutes and regret it.
Late autumn for the colour, early morning for the quiet.
A passage through rock, a threshold, a gate — the forms differ, the movement is the same. That movement is what we practise on our journeys through Japan.
The May 2027 journeys →