cal topography, natural features (in particular, sources
of water), Buddhist monasteries, shrines to local gods,
and narratives formed a single coherent whole. In
other words, sacred spaces were fundamentally associ-
ated with postulated recollections of the past and rit-
ualized practices, all tied up in attitudes and acts of
devotion or piety that have been collectively referred
to as geopietyby the human geographer J. K. Wright
and topophiliaby Yi-Fu Tuan.
In contemporary Japan, about one hundred differ-
ent pilgrimage courses linking more than five hundred
monasteries in all parts of the country attest to the
complexity of sacred space and exemplify the equally
complex nature of the Japanese people’s spiritual and
emotional attachments to their land. Shikoku Island,
for instance, boasts of several mountains that were ob-
jects of Shugendo practices, and it is also the site of
Japan’s most famous pilgrimage. Kukai, the founder of
the Shingon school of esoteric Buddhism, was born
there in the late-eighth century and he practiced aus-
terities in some of these mountains. During the me-
dieval period, Kukai became the object of a nationwide
cult, and a pilgrimage dedicated to him was established
around Shikoku Island; it consists of a course linking
eighty-eight monasteries, and is still quite popular.
Each monastery is sacred, obviously, but so is the en-
tire course, and many pilgrims consider Shikoku Is-
land itself to be sacred.Historical, social, and economic aspects
Sacred spaces, however, have a history. To take one ex-
ample, Japan’s highest mountain, Mount Fuji, was
originally regarded as the abode of one local god; when
Buddhism took charge of the cult around the twelfth
century, the mountain came to be viewed as the abode
of three buddhas and bodhisattvas and of that god as
well, and it became a center of Shugendo. By the sev-
enteenth century, however, Shugendo’s influence
waned (for political reasons), and Mount Fuji became
the object of mass pilgrimages on the part of laypeo-
ple, as a consequence of which the understandings of
the mountain’s sacred character radically changed. An-
other example of major historical changes is the Ise
Shrine, located on the eastern coast of the Kii penin-
sula. It is composed of an Inner Shrine dedicated to
the ancestral god of the imperial house, and of anSPACE, SACREDMonks in the Sacred Caves at Pak Ou, Laos. © Christophe Loviny/Corbis. Reproduced by permission.