Fudarakusan-ji

Most visitors to Nachi head straight up the mountain to the falls and never see this temple, which sits on the flat ground by the sea next to Nachi Station. It is small, the main hall is a modern rebuild, and it takes twenty minutes to see. It also has the strangest story in Kumano.

Fudaraku is the paradise of the bodhisattva Kannon, which people here believed lay somewhere across the southern sea. From the Heian period into the Edo period, monks set out from Nachi beach to reach it alive. The practice is called Fudaraku tokai. A monk was put into a small boat with a cabin, a little food and, according to the prefecture's account, a door nailed shut from outside, and the boat was towed out and cut loose. The prefecture dates the first sailing to 868 and says the practice went on for about a thousand years; the temple cites the Kumano Nendaiki chronicle, which records 19 monks who made the attempt. None is known to have arrived anywhere. In the grounds stands a reconstruction of one of these boats, a little house on a hull with four torii at its corners, and a stone inscribed with the names of monks said to have sailed. Standing next to it is more unsettling than any description.

The temple's own tradition says it was founded by Ragyo Shonin, a holy man who drifted ashore from India in the reign of Emperor Nintoku. It is now a branch temple of Seiganto-ji, up the mountain beside Kumano Nachi Taisha and Nachi Falls, and like them it is one of the component parts of the Sacred Sites and Pilgrimage Routes in the Kii Mountain Range, listed in 2004. Until a typhoon in 1808 it had a large compound; the present hall dates from 1990. The main image, a thousand-armed Kannon with three faces and eleven heads, is an Important Cultural Property and a hidden Buddha, shown only on 27 January, 17 May and 10 July.

The practical case for coming: it is three minutes' walk from JR Nachi Station, where buses leave for the falls, so it fits easily into a wait for the bus. Entry to the grounds is free, and the goshuin is 500 yen. Nachi beach, where the monks set out, is a few minutes away on foot, so walk down to it afterwards.