Kuroki Toshihiro’s (黒木俊弘) 1981 article Shugendō no mine-iri goma-ku to budō rinen (修験道の峰入り護摩供と武道理念; “The Peak-Entry Goma Offering of Shugendō and Budō Ideals”), published in Budōgaku Kenkyū (武道学研究) 14-2, examines and compares sword imagery in Shugendō ritual and historical budō accounts. The link above provides some notes on the article, which is can be read online in its original (opens in a new tab). (Kuroki Toshihiro 1982)
Here we examine some of its conclusions regarding kobudō and the older substrate they are motivated by philosophically, including godai and gogyō concepts as well as inspirations from or references made to celestial figures like Marishiten or guardian deities like Fudō Myōō.
Table of Contents
The mine-iri goma-ku (峰入り護摩供; the goma fire-offering performed before entering the mountains) is the rite yamabushi (山伏) execute before a training retreat. Kuroki frames it as significant precisely because the multi-day peak retreat itself is now rarely performed and essentially unobservable to outsiders, so this pre-departure rite has become the one Shugendō ceremony that can still be documented directly. Because mine-iri also determined a yamabushi’s rank (身分階級) by conferring gen (験; ascetic efficacy/power), it carried real institutional weight. His observations come from two events in Buzen (northern Kyushu): a mine-iri goma at the Buzenbō (豊前坊) precinct of Hikosan in March 1979 (Shōwa 54), and a larger saitō ō-goma-ku (柴灯大護摩供; open-air great goma) at the Kubote Shugen Museum (求菩提修験資料館) in November 1980 (Shōwa 55). He leans mainly on the second.
Reading Koroki 1982
Ritual space (Section II)
The open-air dōjō (道場) is a square roughly 10–15 m per side, bounded by a shimenawa (〆縄; sacred rope) strung between green bamboo to form the kekkai (結界; consecrated enclosure). Two structural points are worth flagging for your interests:
The four sides carry directional colors — East blue/green, West white, South red, North black — with yellow added at the center. This is the wǔxíng (五行; five-phase) directional-color correlation, with the center-yellow marking the axis. The northeast corner is treated as the kimon (鬼門; demon gate), and the altar is deliberately set opposite it, oriented toward the peak to be entered. The central goma pyre functions as a sign of shogō metsuzai (諸業滅罪; expiation of all karmic deeds).
Entry Sequence (Section III)
Arrow purification — before the group enters, yamabushi loose arrows high over the four directions, starting from the kimon (NE) and proceeding S → W → N, using hama-ya (破魔矢; demon-quelling arrows) to scatter malign spirits.
Cutting the boundary — the procession is led by a kai-yamabushi (貝山伏; conch-bearer) and a tachi-yamabushi (太刀山伏; sword-bearer). The tachi-yamabushi severs the shimenawa at the kimon while calling out a kiai-charged proclamation: at Buzenbō, Hito o korosazu, onore kizutsukazu (人を殺さず己れ傷つかず; “kill no one, injure not oneself”); at Kubote, Hito o korosazu, ware mo korosazu (人を殺さず我れも殺さず; “kill no one, and I too kill not”). This is shouted with each stroke. Invoking the deity — inside the kekkai, the sendatsu (先達; guide) takes fire before the altar to summon the mountain spirit, followed by a massed recitation of the Hannya Shingyō (般若心経; Heart Sutra), which Kuroki describes as delivered close to a roar.
Path-opening — two yamabushi each wield a large axe, swinging it around the four sides of the pyre to “open the road” (道拓き) — an act displaying even more force than the sword-bearer’s.
The pyre is then lit from the smoldering lamp-fire, the Heart Sutra is chanted again over blown hora-gai (法螺貝; conch), and departing practitioners are seen off by the remaining yamabushi and families telling their beads, with wishes for peak-safety and fulfillment (峰中安全・諸願成就).
The budō argument (Section V)
This is the analytical core. Kuroki reads the rite as preserving an archaic stratum of budō ideals and draws specific correspondences:
Spatial schema — the four-directional colors plus central yellow appear in the densho (伝書; transmission texts) of the bugei shoryū (武芸諸流; various martial lineages) and survive in the pillars (now suspended tassels) of Tokyo grand sumo. Purification through implements — conch, arrow, sword, axe, and sutra all serve purification and spirit-pacification (清浄鎮魂), on a par with jumon (呪文; incantations) and kuji-giri (九字切り; the nine-syllable cutting) for repelling evil. Archery lineage — the colored four-direction arrow rite persists in kyūdō transmission as the meigen-shiki (鳴弦式; bowstring-twanging rite) and shihō-barai (四方払い; four-direction clearing), and in sumo’s yumitori (弓取り).
The sword’s meaning — Kuroki treats as the key point the tachi-yamabushi’s declaration that the sword is not a tool for wounding people, whether others or self, but one that severs evil spirits and evil thoughts (邪念; janen). He argues this is where Shugendō’s budō is explicitly transmitted, and suggests the iai shihō-giri (四方切り; four-direction cut) and the tachi-mochi (太刀持ち; sword-bearer) at a yokozuna’s dohyō-iri (土俵入り) descend from the same conception. Bodily technique — he closes by noting that the grip, footwork, and hip-settling of the bow-, sword-, and axe-bearing yamabushi were all sound from the standpoint of bujutsu riai (武術の理合; martial logic), and that the axe-bearer’s clearing is also termed reizan kaibyaku (霊山開闢; opening of the sacred mountain).
A brief notice reports that such rites, though held at Ōmine (大峰) and Haguro (羽黒) as well, are rarely witnessable; that the Nishi-Nihon Sangaku Shugen Gakkai (西日本山岳修験学会) was founded at the Kubote museum in 1980 and had just held its second meeting; and it directs inquiries to museum director Shigematsu Toshimi (重松敏美), with Kuroki himself serving as a board member.
In 2026, The Secret World of Shugendō: Sacred Mountains and the Search for Meaning in Post-Disaster Japan (Where Religion Lives) by S.A.P. Dahl, was published by The University of North Carolina Press, detailing some of the Buddhist-centric practices of contemporary Haguro Shūgendo group’s aiki-no-mine retreat.
Analysis
The delusion-cutting sword
A close reading Section V of Kuroki (1982) begs some questions.
Kuroki files the tachi-yamabushi’s proclamation — tachi wa ningen ni ha o mukeru mono de wa naku, jaki akuryō to janen o tachikiru mono de aru (太刀は人間に刃をむけるものではなく邪鬼悪霊と邪念を断ち切るも のである; “the sword does not turn its blade toward human beings, but severs malign demons, evil spirits, and deluded thoughts”) — under “budō ideal,” and gestures at the densho of the martial schools as kin.
But the proclamation’s actual content is doctrinally opposed to the bushi sword-ethic it is usually assimilated to, and its real cognate lies elsewhere.
Two sword-symbolisms are in play, and they are not the same thing:
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The Yagyū katsuninken / setsunintō pairing (活人剣・殺人刀; the life-giving sword / the death-dealing sword), as set out in Yagyū Munenori’s Heihō Kadensho (兵法家伝書, 1632). This ideology is about killing human beings: the frame is that cutting down the one who brings disorder gives life to the many, so that the death-dealing blade and the life-giving blade are one. The blade very much turns toward people; the doctrine concerns the rightness and the mind-state of that act.1
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The Shugendō proclamation, which says the reverse: the blade is not turned toward human beings at all. It severs jaki (邪鬼; malign demons), akuryō (悪霊; evil spirits), and janen (邪念; deluded thoughts). This is apotropaic and exorcistic, not an ethic of righteous killing.
The genuine cognate of the Shugendō proclamation is the esoteric-Buddhist sword of wisdom: the riken (利剣; keen sword) of Monju (文殊; Mañjuśrī) that cuts mumyō (無明; avidyā; ignorance), and above all the delusion-severing Kurikara (倶利伽羅) sword of Fudō Myōō (不動明王; Acala).
The blade that severs deluded thoughts is that of Fudō. Filing the proclamation with Fudō rather than with katsuninken does not weaken the link between sword-culture and Shugendō; it makes it defensible and, more importantly, falsifiable. The plausible bridge between the two sword-symbolisms is a nameable text and person:
- Takuan Sōhō* (沢庵宗彭) addressed the Fudōchi Shinmyōroku (不動智神妙録) to Yagyū Munenori.
The “immovable wisdom” (fudōchi) described in that work is Fudō’s fudō (不動; immovable). So the Yagyū line reaches the delusion-cutting sword via Takuan’s Zen adaptation of Fudō, while Shugendō reaches the same sword directly through its Fudō-centred mikkyō (密教; esoteric Buddhism).
The ideas are then cousins through a common mikkyō ancestor (the Fudō / Monju wisdom-sword), not parent and child. This is also certainly not a bushi budō ideal transmitted into a mountain rite, which is the direction Kuroki’s phrasing implies. Both the ritual proclamation and the katsuninken topos can descend from a shared Buddhist commonplace independently, without either feeding the other.2
Godai inspired gokui
Often both initiation oaths as well as upper-level densho of older martial traditions contain references to Shugendō figures including Fudō, Marishiten or tengu like Tarōbō or others.
Sometimes upper level diagrams found in densho contain colors assocaited to the godai, which need to be explained via kuden (oral attestation) – that oral transmission supercedes any textual analysis we can do at a distance removed from a particular art.
That being said, the canonical godai palette, typically regarded as corresponding to Fudō, is as follows:
- earth: yellow
- water: white
- fire: red
- wind: black
- void: blue-green (azure)
Stacked as the gorintō (五輪塔; five-ring stūpa) this is the body of Dainichi Nyorai (大日如来), who is doctrinally same-body (同体) with Fudō Myōō — so the five godai colors are, in orthodox usage, explicitly Fudō’s colors.3
An orthodox godai is therefore, at the limit, a diagram of Fudō’s body. This is exactly the ancestor §2 posits, now appearing at the center of a sword-bearing school’s secret transmission. However, variants exist.
It is important to remember that godai is not gogyō. Kuroki’s shōgon claim concerned the gogyō (五行; wǔxíng; five-phase) directional decoration of the ritual space (four quarters by the shishin 四神 plus centre-yellow), an onmyōdō spatial cosmology. This scroll is a godai contemplative series, not direction-keyed: no cardinal directions, no shishin. It is a different five-fold system that happens to share the number and the palette. It corroborates the substrate point (§2) while remaining irrelevant to Kuroki’s spatial claim.
Marishiten in contrast
Marishiten is not Fudō in valence – they are distinct entities and never conflated. Marīcī’s register is victory, concealment, and protection in combat, not delusion-cutting. The scroll corroborates the general claim (martial esoterica drawn from mikkyō), not specifically the “sword severs delusion” motif.
Marishiten is a light-deity, so her “color” is really luminosity, not a fixed scheme. She is the deification of kagerō (陽炎; mirage / heat-shimmer) and of sun- and moonlight; her defining property is ongyō (隠形; being insubstantial and unseeable) — she runs ahead of the sun-deva, invisible, and cannot be caught, burned, or wetted. A being defined by formless light doesn’t carry a stable body-color the way, say, the five Buddhas do. Where a body color is given, it’s golden/yellow — the color of sunlight.
Where she does have assigned colors, the scheme is three-faced, not five-fold. In the three-face, six/eight-arm form (三面六臂 / 三面八臂), the colors attach to the faces. A Vajrayāna iconographic catalog gives body yellow, front face yellow, right face red, and the left boar-face black, with a variant face-set of blue/red/white. So the “Marīcī palette,” to the extent one exists, is a triad — {yellow, red, black} or {blue, red, white} — organized around her faces and her boar aspect, not a five-phase cosmology. Combine the two variants and you just recover the generic goshiki five (黄赤黒青白), which every five-color Buddhist scheme uses; it isn’t distinctive to her.
Marishiten was the warrior tutelary par excellence — Kusunoki Masashige is said to have kept a small Marishiten image inside his helmet, and Mōri Motonari and Tachibana Dōsetsu used a “Marishiten banner”. Taisha-ryū kenjutsu still chants a Marishiten sutra before training and enbu. Martial schools embed Marishiten as a live convention, even as it confirms her valence is victory/concealment, not delusion-cutting.
She has a strong astral-cosmological identity as a celestial figure. In the Daoist reception Marishiten is worshipped as Doumu (斗母元君; Dǒumǔ Yuánjūn), the Dipper-Mother — a stellar deity — and she has heavy mountain-cult associations (peaks named Marishiten on Ontake, Norikura, Kai-Koma). So a five-fold cosmology sitting under her invocation is thematically coherent, but that’s a thematic fit, not a color derivation.
Note that the per-face colors listed above are from a Tibetan/Chinese Vajrayāna catalog (the 大摩里支菩薩経 lineage).
Japanese mikkyō sources dwell on the light/invisibility and the three-face-plus-boar iconography but are largely silent on any systematic color assignment — so “no five-color palette” is a well-supported.
In arts that venerate Marishiten or other esoteric figures (such as Atago Dai Gongen) it may be that the shugen/mikkyō substrate is not a mere narrative preface but structural to the transmission. Combined with the Marishiten godai gokui (§3), the arts may show a consistent esoteric program keyed to two warrior-tutelary shugen/mikkyō deities (Marishiten; Atago / Shōgun Jizō) — materially stronger corroboration for §2’s “shared mikkyō ancestor” reading than any single diagram alone. Other arts, such as Jikishinkage-ryū, feature significant seals/representations of Fudō Myōō but also stem from arts (Shinkage-ryū) where Marishiten features prominently.
End Notes
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Munenori’s wording (活人剣 / 殺人刀) should be verified against the Heihō Kadensho text directly before quotation; cited here from recollection of the standard reading, not a checked edition. ↩
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However, Shinkage-ryū is prevalent in Kyushu. ↩
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Standard godai color assignment (地黄・水白・火赤・風黒・空青) from a Buddhist reference dictionary (Jōdo-shū daijiten, s.v. 五色); the identification of the gorintō five colors with Dainichi Nyorai and, through 同体 with Fudō Myōō, with Fudō’s colors, is drawn from temple-reference material (Naritasan Shinshō-ji exposition of the 五色幕). Reliable enough to state the correspondence; replace with a mikkyō-studies citation before print. ↩
References
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