If you look up Japanese mummies on the Internet,
you’ll get a bunch of videos and articles about how they were these
amazing hermit monks who turned themselves into mummies
using some crazy techniques.
Sometimes humans can do unbelievable things,
and sometimes we shouldn’t believe it.
I’m gonna risk stirring up the ramen here.
I’ll go over what everybody says about these mummies,
then sift through the broth to see if there’s any actual beef.
The popular story goes like this.
There was this sect of Buddhist hermit monks on Mount Yudono.
Each monk lived alone hiking, doing prayers, communing with nature.
Once in a while, a monk would get bored talking to a pine tree,
and think, “Wouldn’t it be cool to become a buddha?”
And start a years-long journey to a destination called self-mummification.
He would become immortal and an actual buddha in his own body.
Armed with the powers of a buddha,
he could pump people full of enlightenment
and help them escape the Buddhist cycle of suffering.
First he stopped eating actual food and only ate wood.
We’re talking twigs, tree bark, leaves, pine needles,
whatever wood he could find off a tree or on the ground.
The Internet is all, “Wow this crazy diet actually helped them mummify!”
You see their food was low in fat and super low in food.
Starvation is great for removing fat from the body,
keeping it as dry as possible, to prevent decay.
A good Japanese mummy is like a good British comedian,
it must be dry and is often starving.
After a thousand days of tree dining, the monk did something crazy.
Showing serious religious conviction,
he faced one of the worst fears of most people.
He squeezed into a little underground room,
just small enough for him to sit in meditation,
so about the size of a typical Tokyo apartment,
and told his disciples to seal it.
It was pretty much a coffin and he was pretty much buried alive.
A single bamboo straw connected the coffin to the upper world
to give the monk some air.
He sat in the dark busy chanting, meditating,
and deeply focusing his thoughts on re-evaluating his life choices.
Every so often, he rang a bell to say, “I’m still here.”
When the ringing stopped for a while, they pulled out the bamboo straw,
and sealed the hole.
The monk stayed there for another thousand days before people dug him up,
revealing a mummified mountain priest.
To his supporters, he didn’t die,
he overcame his body’s biological needs
and entered a state of deep meditation.
Well, they were, but we should take these stories with a grain of salt,
followed by the rest of the shaker.
Let’s peel back the layers of this mystery.
You’ll be surprised at how many layers there are.
First, the whole wood eating business.
Wood eating was a thing.
People called these monks wood eaters, but it was more like foraging.
They ate what they could find in the forest,
including berries, nuts, and fruits,
and the occasional tree bark and twigs for extra fiber.
Also, they only did it short term, maybe a week or so at a time.
Most of the time they could eat anything except the Ten Cereals.
The list of banned cereals is a bit different depending on who you ask,
so the number 10 could have been symbolic,
meaning it was a no-cereal diet in general.
Now before you go look it up,
a cereal is any grass plant that has grains you can eat.
Turns out, this thousand-day no-cereal diet and the occasional wood eating
had as much to do with mummification as mumble rappers have to do with good music.
Not much.
They actually went on these diets all the time,
to help their followers and supporters.
These mountain priests were part of the Yudono sect on Mount Yudono,
famous for having mummies.
The Yudono mummies were called “buddhas in their own bodies,”
or sokushinbutsu 即身仏,
to their friends and family and pretentious tourists.
Over 20 Japanese mummies have been found.
Some sit in dedicated temple halls today where people can come and worship.
High ranking members of the Yudono sect went on
what were called Thousand Day Ascetic Retreats.
People thought the time these monks spent in the mountains made them mysterious and
gave them a ton of religious Buddhist merit,
which they could hand out to their followers.
They were seen as part Buddhist priest, part wizard.
You’re a Buddhist wizard, Harry.
When a lord prepared for battle, or a noble prepared for a divorce battle,
they sometimes sent donations to a Yudono monk and asked him to go on a camping trip
to help them win, like a spiritual mercenary.
Or when someone made a vow, he might sponsor a trip to help fulfill the vow.
A Yudono monk went up the mountain carrying
the weight of a hundred vows on his back,
and a hundred threatening stares on his ass.
Because if he failed in his work, his supporters lost their spiritual help.
Everything he did on the trip had ritual meaning.
He lived in a hut.
The hut became a spiritual place.
The fire in the center of the hut was a holy fire.
Cooking food?
Holy food.
Eating food?
Holy eating.
S--tting food?
Holy s--t.
Everyday he made three trips from the hut to a sacred rock
from which flowed warm spring water, and cleansed himself.
Sometimes he would make his no-cereal diet even stricter
and only eat things he could find in the forest.
This multiplied the amount of spiritual power he gathered,
and the amount of poops he took.
Now there are records of sponsors donating rice and other food for the trip,
so at least sometimes, these monks did eat a bit of the forbidden cereals.
This strict diet might not have been as strict as we thought,
but then that’s how all diets tend to go.
Yeah I’m talking to you, eating that ice cream.
The last day of the trip was called the vow-fulfilling day,
when the monk strutted down the mountain super thin but fat with spiritual power,
spreading the good karma to those who donated.
It was serious business, they kept records of donors.
Some donors sent food and even men to help him out.
Before the big battle of Sekigahara that led to the rise of the Tokugawa shogunate,
one warlord vowed to Tokugawa Ieyasu that he would be victorious.
Then he asked a Yudono priest to go on a retreat up the mountain to help them win,
and sent 108 men with him to help out and soak in that karmic goodness.
The fact that they could also make sure the monk
didn’t slack off on his duties was purely coincidental.
The trips didn’t even have to be 1000 days long,
this one was only 48 days.
Sometimes shorter is just fine.
Where my Asians at?
With all the sponsors and donations,
it looks like the solitary lives of these monks
were not that solitary.
They were totally dependent on society to survive.
They might have spent a lot of time alone in nature,
but hermit monks who roamed the mountains surviving off the land,
they were not.
Their food and money came from supporters.
So if they didn’t eat wood to start the self-mummifying process,
how did they do it?
Well, they didn’t.
They didn’t spend years preparing their bodies, didn’t bury themselves alive,
probably didn’t even choose to be a mummy.
Japan’s wet climate laughs at mummies.
If a monk died in that underground room of terror,
he would just decay into bones of sadness.
Mummies prefer dry weather.
Mummification had nothing to do with the monk’s actions,
and everything to do with the actions of his disciples.
That body was becoming a mummy even if
Jesus came back and said Buddhism was wrong.
What actually happened was…
When an important monk died,
his disciples put him in a thick wooden coffin
to keep out water and bugs
and laid it in an underground room.
They kept him there for 1000 days.
It didn’t do anything, it was a symbolic 1000 day retreat,
where the monk could symbolically meditate and boost the karmic merit he gained.
He was already dead at this point, but over the years
the tales might have been twisted in the telling,
and people started believing that these monks willingly
stepped into the chamber.
When the timer struck Day 1000, the disciples pulled out a well-preserved,
but extremely life-challenged, mountain priest.
They cleaned him up and lit a bunch of candles and incense to dry him out,
then intimately rubbed him with a mixed drink of persimmon juice
and Japanese mugwort to prevent decay.
Now after the thousand days in that coffin,
the corpse shouldn’t be too decayed,
but we do know of one monk named Tetsuryūkai
who came out all like a compost heap,
so his disciples cut out his internal organs
and stuffed his torso with limestone powder to keep him dry.
The most famous Japanese mummy was Tetsumonkai.
He didn’t bury himself alive.
His main disciple actually wrote about his death.
One day, he just got sick and died,
probably from eating teriyaki tree bark all the time.
They prayed and gave him medicine, but couldn’t save him.
So Plan B was to mummify him.
No evidence that Tetsumonkai asked for this.
Why did his disciples do it?
Look, followers spent years donating food and money to a mountain priest.
They formed a karmic connection with him.
Ain’t gonna let a little death break that bond.
Vows don’t fulfill themselves.
At some point, people ran with the idea
that a monk could survive forever in deep meditation,
and even become a buddha.
It was comforting to think that their master didn’t leave,
he was still there to help them through life.
Legends about these mummies started popping up
like mushrooms on Tetsuryūkai’s corpse.
All credit went to the monk, for planning to become a buddha in his own body,
for entering the underground room and chanting until he died,
for becoming a mummy.
After Tetsumonkai’s death, followers made up all kinds of stories about his life,
each more incredible than the last.
You’re gonna love this one about Tetstumonkai’s pp.
They said Tetsumonkai was a real troublemaker and ladies’ man in his youth,
breaking hearts and selling them as new,
but he ditched that life to be a Yudono priest.
One day, a prostitute came and begged him to return to her.
The priest said, “Wait here,”
and stepped out for a bit.
He returned with a bundle.
With the calm usually reserved for opening a box of tissues,
he opens the bundle, revealing
a pp.
His pp.
He had cut it to show that he was
no longer interested in that promiscuous life.
The woman said thanks, not knowing the etiquette for these situations,
then took it home and made a shrine of it in her brothel,
after which her brothel was blessed with many clients.
In another story, during a plague that made people blind,
Tetsumonkai yanked out his left eye and threw it into the Sumida River
as an offering to the river god, who I guess collected eyeballs.
Well it worked, the plague ended and everyone was happy,
except for his right eye, who lost a friend.
When researchers examined Tetsumonkai’s mummy,
they found that it was missing a left eye.
The pp was still there, so that story was false.
However, he was missing his balls.
Don’t worry, they were found in the Nangakuji Temple,
where they were kept as a hidden object of worship.
After analyzing it, the researchers concluded
that the eye and balls were cut after mummification,
meaning there’s a good chance that people cut them
to fit existing stories and not the other way around.
The mountain priests of Yudono had a lot of interesting practices,
but self-mummifying didn’t seem to be one of them.
Buddhism has a bunch of beliefs around death,
especially around the exact point of death.
Like the Japanese were terrified of their last dying thoughts
and did all kinds of things to make sure
they held the correct thought exactly when they died.
Click here to see how and why they did that.
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