Eating Trees, Becoming Buddhas:Trees and the Possibility of History

The Buddhist monk Honmyōkai Shōnin (本明海上人) sits peacefully in a temple at the base of the Dewa Sanzan, or the Three Sacred Peaks, in the Tōhoku region of Japan. He does not speak, but he attracts much attention. The attention he draws is closely tied to the politics of temporality and of the peaks that rise behind him. He defies commonsensical notions of what time and nature are in a way that attests to the powers of Buddhism and of trees. You see, Honmyōkai Shōnin has been sitting since 1683, the year he became a “buddha in this body” (sokushinbutsu). He achieved that buddhahood by mummifying himself, a process that involved “eating trees” (moku jiki shugyō) for 3,000 days.

Eating trees tied Honmyōkai Shōnin to a history of relation between trees, bodies, and buddhahood. Following traditions that can be traced back to at least 298 A.D. in China, living on only what the trees provided allowed him to greatly reduce the fat in his body. Once he felt that he was near death, he entered a pit that was approximately three meters deep, fasted, and chanted sutras until his bodily functions ceased. As was customary in the practice of “eating trees,” his dried, preserved body was exhumed three years and three months after his humanly death. The undeteriorated state of his body served as a sign of his accomplishment of buddhahood.