For centuries, the great Shingon Buddhist center at Mount Koya barred women from entering. The prohibition was absolute -- no exceptions, no appeals. So women went somewhere else. Tucked into the forested mountainside of Mount Muro in what is now Uda, Nara Prefecture, the temple of Muro-ji offered the same Shingon teachings, the same esoteric Buddhist practice, the same mountain solitude -- and it opened its doors to everyone. The temple earned a name that was both description and quiet rebuke: Onna Koya, Mount Koya for Women. The distinction made Muro-ji famous, but the temple's story runs deeper than gender and gatekeeping. It begins with a dragon, a sick prince, and a prayer for rain that actually worked.
Legend credits the monk En no Gyoja with founding Muro-ji by order of Emperor Tenmu, and later tradition claims Kukai himself restored it. But the temple's own historical record tells a different origin story. When Prince Yamabe -- who would become Emperor Kanmu -- fell gravely ill, a monk performed a ritual at the site addressed to a local dragon spirit associated with Ryujin, the dragon god of the sea. The prince recovered. Impressed and grateful, the imperial court ordered a monk from the powerful nearby temple of Kofuku-ji, in Nara, to construct a new temple on the mountain. The dragon spirit was no abstraction: the caves scattered around Mount Muro were believed to have been carved by the dragon itself, and those caves remain sacred ground. Muro-ji was built not on empty land but on a place already charged with supernatural presence.
For most of its history, Muro-ji operated as a subtemple of Kofuku-ji, the great Nara temple that had ordered its construction. Monks from Kofuku-ji made regular summer retreats to the mountain site for prayer and meditation. The arrangement lasted until 1694, when Muro-ji gained independence. A further rupture came in 1868, during the Meiji government's campaign to separate Shinto and Buddhist institutions. The Ryuketsu Shrine, which had been part of the Muro-ji complex, was formally severed from the temple. The separation was administrative, not spiritual -- the dragon worshipped at both shrine and temple was the same creature, and the bond between the two institutions persists in practice to this day.
Among the ninth-century buildings that survive at Muro-ji, the five-story pagoda is the most celebrated. It is the smallest five-story pagoda standing in the open air in all of Japan -- a delicate wooden tower that seems scaled for contemplation rather than spectacle. The pagoda's age and diminutive proportions make it both a National Treasure and a point of vulnerability. In 1998, a typhoon toppled a tree onto the structure, causing major damage. The restoration took two years of painstaking work, but the pagoda stands again on its mountainside perch, its wooden tiers darkened by twelve centuries of weather. The temple complex climbs the slope in a progression typical of Shingon mountain temples, with halls and gates stepping upward through the forest canopy.
The dragon of Mount Muro never left. Each October, the Autumn Ryuketsu Shrine festival revives the old bond between temple and shrine, between Buddhism and the older dragon worship that predates it. Two life-sized dragon figures woven from straw are placed on the grounds of Muro-ji and along the road to the Ryuketsu Shrine. The next day, the head priest of Muro-ji leads a procession between the two sites, pausing to perform rituals before each straw dragon. The rain prayers that once defined the dragon cult are no longer practiced, but the Muro dragon endures as a living tradition -- a thread connecting the temple's twenty-first-century visitors to the monks who first climbed this mountain because a prince was sick and a dragon, they believed, held the cure.
Located at 34.538N, 136.041E in the forested mountains east of the Yamato Basin, Nara Prefecture. Muro-ji sits in a narrow valley along the Muro River, surrounded by dense cedar and cypress forest. The temple is difficult to spot from high altitude due to forest cover, but the valley and river provide a navigation reference. Best viewed below 4,000 feet AGL following the river valley east from Uda city. Nearest major airports: Osaka Itami (RJOO) approximately 35 NM west; Kansai International (RJBB) approximately 45 NM southwest; Nagoya Chubu Centrair (RJGG) approximately 55 NM east-northeast. Terrain rises steeply in this area -- maintain safe altitude and be alert to ridgelines in reduced visibility.