Nachi waterfall is the largest in Japan. It’s also revered as a kami. It not only speaks of the blessings of nature, but it radiates negative ions. Nowhere else exudes vitality quite as strongly.
In times past the waterfall was worshipped directly, and still today there is a platform near the base of the waterfall where prayers are offered. Now, unfortunately, there are cranes, trucks and large-scale repairs going on after a devastating typhoon last year. All along the Kumano River too are scenes of debris from landslides and fallen boulders.
Nachi Taisha stands on a nearby hillside, though curiously you can only see the waterfall from its neighbour – Seiganto-ji. Actually, it’s not so curious – for hundreds of years these two World Heritage properties were one and the same complex. Still today they have a symbiotic feel, with a mere gateway between them. The route leads from one to the other, and visitors pass automatically from the world of kami into that of the buddha.
Like the other Kumano shrines, Nachi displays its three-legged crow connection, and I was taken into the honden precincts by a priest to see a rock claimed to be its petrified body. According to legend, it flew here after its mission and turned into a rock. It seemed to me that perhaps there was some connection with the shadowy figure who lies behind the symbol – a shamanic seat or altar, for instance. I put my speculation to the priest, but he laughed it off as a foreigner’s amusing fantasy.
The shrine boasts the biggest box for picking fortunes (omikuji) I’ve seen in Japan. It boasts too a sacred tree that is the most striking I’ve ever come across. It was supposedly planted by Taira no Shigemori (1138-1179), son of Kiyomori, and though it’s still flourishing you can walk down some steps, enter into the hollow and come out the other side. Awesome! It’s as if for a few brief moments you plug into the tree spirit.
Although it’s the main feature in the precincts, most people oddly seem to walk straight past it. Yet when I think of Nachi from now on, it will not only be for the waterfall. It will be for the petrified three-legged crow, and for that very special sacred tree.
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