Shirayama Hime Jinja Shrine（白山比咩神社）

 

Shirayama Hime Jinja Shrine（白山比咩神社）is a Japanese shinto shrine located in Hakusan-City, Ishikawa, Japan. It is a headquarter of the whole Shirayama or Hakusan shines under the faith that Mr. Hakusan is a place of divinity.
（The same for the word "白山" but two ways of pronunciation; "Hakusan" in Chinese reading and "Shirayama" in Japanese reading. It's chosen based on origins of each shrine.)

According to the shrine's chronicle, it's been more than 2,100 years old, and its name appears in an official shrine list （Engi-shi Jimmei-cho：延喜式神名帳）edited by the imperial court in 927 AD (so, it has at least 1,090-year history for its service.)

The shrine's main deity is Kikuri-hime (菊理媛), a female divinity who is said to have strength to conclude things or arbitrate disputes, based on a myth that the deity arbitrated a quarrel between Izanagi and Izanami, the divine couple who gave birth to lands of Japan. (For this divine couple, you can refer to my previous article.)


Mountain worship
Mountains are sources of life as a place of foods (hunting/agriculture) and water (rivers/lakes), so it works as "source of life" to people. At the same time, they turn into threats to life such as volcanic activities, landslides/avalanches to crash people's life and civilization. People in the ancient time came to feel appreciation and awesomeness towards those characteristic, and then they started to worship mountains as a place where something divine resides.

Firstly, the worship was just for mountains per se, but later people began to worship specific mountains such as Mt. Fuji, Mt. Miwa etc.. by seeing them  "divinity body" embracing the deities' souls.

After Buddhism was introduced from India via China and the Korean Peninsula, a new faith style called Shugen-do（修験道）emerged as a result of fusion between the mountain worship and Buddhism. Under the Shugen-do, monks started to get inside the mountains from which people were told to stay away because of its sacredness, in order to train their selves spiritually.

Mt. Hakusan
Mt. Hakusan was worshiped as a water deity for agricultural purpose and a guidepost guardian for maritime transportation (it can be seen from vessels on the sea of Japan as its height is 2,702 meter).

Mt. Hakusan（※）

（※）Retrieved on 2017/8/21 on Wikidedia. Attribution:  By Alpsdake - 投稿者自身による作品, CC 表示-継承 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15850055

In 717 AD, a Buddhist monk Taicho（泰澄）went into Mt. Hakusan and legendarily he met soul of the mountain's divinity. He then organized official ways to worship the mountain（hakusan-shinko 白山信仰）and it is said to be an origin of today's faith towards the mountain.

Kikuri-hime
The shrine explains that the main deity Kikuri-hime is "a mother deity of the whole life forms", and it resides in Mt. Hakusan. (They have two buildings for worship; the main alter in a plain field and the other "okumiya" or inner alter is on top of Mr. Hakusan.) However, no official linkage between Mt. Hakusan and the shrine's deity Kikuri-hime have been confirmed yet.

Academically, there have been some writings/scrolls in history, which indicates that Kikuri-hime resided in the mountain, but they were all published several hundreds years after the shrine's establishment 2,100 years ago. Even if the establishment was just a legend, the time gap could not be fulfilled to explain why the female deity has been seen as the mountain's divinity ever since the shrine started its service.

That said, even with some mysteries, it's no doubt that the shrine and mountain have been "sacred" in people's heart for at least these 1,000 years.

[note]
Japanese version of this article is available from my archive.